Japan’s war with China, in particular the “Three All’s Policy” (Kill All, Loot All, Burn All) officially known in Japan as the “Burn to Ash Strategy”, and Japan’s occupation of French Indochina led to America’s scrap metal and oil embargo of Japan in July of 1941. Japan relied on America for 90% of its tin, steel and oil. Emperor Hirohito directed negotiators to find a compromise with the US by 1 November or he would order the Japanese military to make preparations to seize the oil fields, rubber plantations, and tin mines of the Dutch East Indies. Before this could be done, Malaya, a British possession had to be cleared, as did the Philippines, a US Commonwealth. In order to protect these offensives from counterattack by the US Pacific Fleet, Adm Yamamoto envisioned a surprise attack on its anchorage at Pearl Harbor.

On 1 Nov, the Japanese Embassy in Washington DC reported no progress in the negotiations, and Hirohito gave his approval for preparations for war with the Netherlands, Great Britain and America, with the caveat that if a breakthrough at the table was made, the preparation would be called off. Aware that the Americans and British were tracking their carriers via radio transmissions, the Japanese immediately implemented a long prepared “deception and denial” plan that included a massive increase in fake radio transmissions. It threw the US Navy intelligence sections across the Pacific into chaos. That day, CMDR Joseph Rochefort, lead cryptanalyst of the US Navy’s Hawaii station, reported that the Japanese changed the call signs of every ship in their fleet, and his section was trying to sort everything out. That afternoon, the US Pacific Fleet went on the first of many alerts over the next month. The next day the Japanese increased the encryption of Rochefort’s “baby”, the Japanese “Flag Officer’s Code”, in addition to the Main Fleet Cipher JN-25. At the morning briefing the unorthodox but brilliant Rochefort had the unenvious job of telling Admiral Kimmel that he had “lost” four Japanese aircraft carriers. (He had actually lost six: he had mistakenly placed two in the Marshall Islands. All six were enroute to the Kurile Islands for a “fleet exercise”, actually to conduct rehearsals and prepare for the attack on Pearl Harbor, but they wouldn’t know that for another two weeks.)

In response, Kimmel ordered another alert. Additionally, he assumed the Philippines would most likely be a target of any initial Japanese attack (He was not wrong, just not right, ask an intelligence officer to explain the difference), so he also ordered the formation of the Pacific Escort Force to convoy merchantmen and freighters from Pearl Harbor to the Far East, as his brethren were doing in the Atlantic. That evening, the last non-convoyed ship reached its destination when Wake Island was reinforced by a detachment from the 1st Marine Defense Battalion led by Major James Devereux, bringing the garrison of the tiny atoll to just under 400 men.

On October 31st, 1941, the USS Reuben James was escorting an eastbound convoy from Halifax, Nova Scotia and was sunk by a torpedo from a German Type IX U Boat U-552 off the coast of Iceland. Although the German declaration of war and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor were still more than a month away, she was the first American ship sunk by enemy fire during World War II. The Reuben James was part of the “Undeclared War” fought against the German Navy while protecting convoys supplying Lend Lease material to Great Britain in 1941.

When Germany invaded Denmark in 1940, Britain occupied Iceland, a nominally independent state that Denmark was in union with. As part of FDR’s Lend-Lease Act in early 1941, US Marines occupied Reykjavik in order to free British troops for operations in North Africa.

In the latter half of 1941, the US Navy in the Atlantic was taking an increasingly active role in defending convoys against U-Boats despite no declaration of war between the US and Germany. After the “Greer Incident” in early September (the first time a U Boat fired on a US ship and vice versa) FDR issued a “shoot on sight” order for all German ships in the Atlantic. By October, it was common practice for the US Navy to escort convoys as far as Iceland before turning them over to the Royal Navy.

On 16 October 1941, a German wolfpack attacked a British convoy SC-42 (from Sydney, Canada to Liverpool, England) off of Iceland and overwhelmed the Canadian escorts. After losing nine merchantmen, the convoy commander requested the assistance of the USS Kearny and three other American destroyers docked at Reykjavik. All evening the four destroyers dropped depth charges on the German U-boats, possibly sinking one, and saved the remainder of the convoy.

But the Germans weren’t finished. Just after midnight on the 17th, U-568 fired a spread of torpedoes and one hit the Kearny killing ten sailors and wounding more than twenty. The Kearny managed to control the damage and make it back to Iceland and eventually Boston. The casualties in the Kearney Incident were the first American deaths in the undeclared war against Germany, more than six weeks before Pearl Harbor.

On 16 October 1916, BB-39, the USS Arizona, named for the newest state in the Union, was commissioned at Brooklyn Naval Yard in New York City. She was the second and last of the Pennsylvania class “super dreadnoughts”.

Battleship technology was rapidly improving in the decade of the First World War, but the US Navy wanted a “standard type battleship” with similar characteristics to simplify operations. The first class of these super dreadnoughts, the Nevada, set the template for battleships as we think of them today: four turrets split by a central superstructure, moderate speed, oil fueled, long cruising range, extreme gunnery ranges, and an “All or Nothing” armor concept. From 1912-1918, five classes of thirteen ships were constructed and they formed the backbone of the US Navy for twenty years. The Arizona was the second ship of the second class, number four of thirteen.

The biggest flaw of the old ironclads and eventually the Dreadnought class of battleships was the relatively uniform armor across the ship. As the ships got larger, the armor got thinner, but heavier. Something had to give. Battle experience had shown that ships could survive being hit in non-critical areas such as berths, administration, galleys etc, but a hit to the fire control, engine, ammunition, propellant etc greatly degraded if not destroyed the ship. The All or Nothing concept put these essential, and very vulnerable, areas in a central heavily armored “citadel” (the “All”) and minimal armor on everything else (the “nothing”). This saved weight and subsequently increased the armor of the citadel. The compact citadel and turrets had the vast majority of the armor which made the Standard type battleships very survivable. The enemy armor piercing shells that didn’t hit the citadel or turrets flew through the ship’s non battle essential areas usually without exploding. The Nevada class was the first class of battleship to incorporate the All or Nothing concept and the Pennsylvania class improved on it. The concept was confirmed at the recent Battle of Jutland. When the Arizona was launched, her citadel was impervious to the 14” shells of the largest guns in that engagement.

The Arizona and her sisters didn’t see action during the First World War due to an oil crisis, but because of the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, they were essential to the US foreign policy in the inter war years. The Arizona was the flagship of Battleship Division One and represented American interests in the Mediterranean and Caribbean in the 1920s. In 1928, she was transferred to the Pacific Fleet and became the centerpiece of War Plan Orange, the on-the-shelf US Pacific campaign against a potentially belligerent Japan.

In mid-October 1941, almost exactly 25 years after her commission, the Arizona led the Pacific fleet to sea from its peacetime headquarters at San Diego. Due to a breakdown in the negotiations with an increasingly aggressive and militaristic Japan, the American Pacific Fleet sailed as a show of force to its new anchorage on the big island of Oahu, Hawaii, at Pearl Harbor.

At the height of the Battle of Britain and 16 months before America’s entry into the war, Liberty Magazine, a pop culture general interest weekly out of New York published the prologue of Fred Allhof’s alt-history pulp fiction “Lightning of the Night”. Like other alt-history greats, such as the “The Third World War”, “Red Storm Rising” and “Ghost Fleet”, “Lightning in the Night” was written with the advice and input of leading military and civilian experts of the time, including Lieutenant General Robert Lee Bullard, the first commander of the 1st Infantry Division, who led the Big Red One at the Battle of Cantigny.

Set after the Nazi victory over Europe, “Lightning in the Night” was the story of the German invasion of North America. The prologue began with a surprise air attack on Pearl Harbor…