Incoming passengers on the American liner watched the planes swoop down over Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field, commended the U.S. Navy's thoughtfulness in staging a big-scale war game on Sunday morning. An American automobile salesman, en route to Tientsin, gawked admiringly as a bomb whooshed into the harbor a scant 100 yards away: "Boy! What if that had been a real one?" The perspiring ship's officer who finally broke the bad news flubbed his lines: "It seems there's a state of undeclared war between Honolulu and the United States."
Even the Christian Science Monitor's war correspondent, Joseph C. Harsch, was...