Indomitable Will: Turning Defeat into Victory from Pearl Harbor to Midway

Some of the worst military disasters in U.S. history occurred between Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and the Battle of Midway in June 1942. During this period, the American people faced a barrage of bad news and accounts of defeats and retreats. Yet if they were shocked and dismayed, they showed little panic. Indomitable Will resurrects the legacy of this first half-year of American combat during WWII -a legacy of pain, but not of woe. Historian Charles Kupfer recounts the story of the war's early defeats: Bataan, Corregidor, Wake Island, and the Java Sea. Some of these battles remain evocative today; others are obscure; all were catastrophes for American arms. Kupfer asserts, however, that later victories were made inevitable by the steeling effect of those initial disasters. Weaving together military, journalistic, political, and cultural histories, this engaging book shows that by setting their collective will on victory, Americans in and out of uniform gained strength from their setbacks. Indomitable Will spells out how the nation turned early defeat into ultimate victory.

Table of Contents:
1. Through December 8 2. DECEMBER 9-31, 1941 3. JANUARY 1941 4. FEBRUARY 1942 5. MARCH 1942 6. APRIL 1942 7. MAY 1942 Notes Bibliography

About the Author :
Charles Kupfer is Associate Professor of American Studies and History at Penn State Harrisburg. He is the author of We Felt the Flames: Hitler's Blitzkrieg, America's Story.

Review :
"Near the start of this masterful narrative, Charles Kupfer asserts that the key to Franklin Roosevelt's presidential success was an "ability to frame the national discourse through his own rhetorical powers." Professor Kupfer might as well be talking about himself, for Indomitable Will provides a template for how cultural history ought to be written-with a scholar's attention to critical nuance, an anthropologist's insight into national character, a novelist's eye for human detail, and a foolproof ear for American lingo. Ranging freely across disciplines and genres, from military history to media studies, Indomitable Will is a marvelous and persuasive hybrid of a book, a creature as rarely encountered as the unicorn in the forests of American Studies: a work of original scholarship that will inform and entertain a popular audience." -Campbell McGrath, Philip and Patricia Frost Professor of Creative Writing, Florida International University