The story
Engaged to the man of her dreams, working at a job she loves, Claire couldn’t be happier. But that’s before the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. Before she learns her cousins have been killed. And before Daniel Essex, the man she promised to marry, inexplicably rejects going to war.
Refusing to marry a man she considers a coward, if not a traitor, Claire moves to Washington D.C., so that her work as a journalist can contribute to the war effort, and hopefully help her broken heart to mend. But when a family emergency takes her back to California, Claire is once again thrown into Daniel’s company.
Will she come to understand why he made the choices he did, or will his decision to go against the tide of public opinion destroy any hope of their reconciliation.
The background
In December, 1937 the Japanese army marched into the city of Nanking, China, and in seven weeks slaughtered more than 300,000 Chinese men, women and children. One of the most horrendous acts against humanity of the twentieth century, it came to be called “the Rape of Nanking.” Unempeachable accounts were printed in the Reader’s Digest and other mainstream periodicals. That same year President Roosevelt signed the U.S. Neutrality Act.
Japan continued its “holy war” against China, and in September of 1940 signed a treaty with Germany and Italy, an obvious pact against the United States.
December 7, 1941, at 7:55 the Japanese planes arrived at their targets. At approximately 8:10 a.m. The battleship USS Arizona exploded. In less than nine minutes she sank, carrying with her a crew of 1,177, the second wave of planes arriving an hour later. Within two hours and twenty minutes, Pearl Harbor was in shambles with 2,403 American boys dead and 1,178 wounded.
The inspiration
This book is dedicated to the loyal Japanese Americans who sacrificed their lives fighting for their country and those interned who endured and transcended their circumstances. And to the conscientious objectors who served their country bravely as medics and fire fighters, worked in hospital and as teachers, for the forest service and built the Transcontinental Highway.