James F. Lee

I was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1952 well after World War II ended, but while I was growing up, the war was never far away. My father was a veteran and often talked about his war experiences, and when the kids in my neighborhood played “army” in the nearby woods, we were refighting Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal. My mother’s war experiences as a young widow and evacuee from Pearl Harbor, however, we never talked about – the subject wasn’t taboo, it just wasn’t discussed. But I was intensely curious about what happened to her at Pearl Harbor. Yet, as so often happens in families, by the time I was ready to ask questions, she was incapable of giving answers.

Writing a book about my mother’s experience at Pearl Harbor had been in the back of my mind for many years, and I started the research for it in 2001. three years after she passed away. Over the next ten years, I visited the National Archives in College Park, San Bruno, and Washington, D.C., the Library of Congress, the Hawaii State Archives, Boston Public Library, the U.S. Military History Institute, and Navy Heritage Center, among other archives and libraries. The greatest pleasure of my decade-long research was finding and interviewing survivors from the Pearl Harbor attack, some of them military people stationed there, but most civilians living there as children. Those people told me their stories about the day of the bombing, about living in Hawaii before and after the attack, and about the long journey home. Their stoicism and humor were a revelation.

I have been a writer and teacher of writing and journalism for 25 years, first at Susquehanna University and later at Bucknell University. During that time, I have written dozens of freelance travel articles for newspapers, including The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, and Buffalo News. My first book, The Lady Footballers: Struggling to Play in Victorian Britain (Routledge 2008) was inspired by my love of soccer. Over many summers, I researched the book in the dusty stacks of the Bodleian Library and British Library Newspaper Collections whenever I got a chance to visit Britain.