Long Day's Journey into War [antikvár]

T I he most calamitous December 7, reputedly, occurred in JL 2347 b.c. On tiiat Sunday morning, so Archbishop of Armagh James Ussher calculated in 1597, Noah's Flood began. Less in dispute is a later December 7, also much associated with water, ships, mountains, and unheeded prophecies of catastrophe. December 7, 1941, entered history west of the 180th meridian. The calendar day begins where the International Date Line straddles that artificial, often crooked band of mrbulent ocean arching the earth from pole to pole just beyond Hawaii. Forty-eight hours are required to rotate a date worldwide. Over segments of three calendar days somewhere upon the face of the globe it was December 7, a swath of time that was simultaneously the flood tide of Axis power and the beginning of its ebb. Amidst an island-dotted expanse misnamed Pacific, what had begun half a world away in 1939 as a European war became the first truly global war. When December 7 first arrived to the watery west of the Date Line, in the vicinity of Wake Island, it was 10:00 p.m. on the sixth in Tokyo, 1:00 p.m. that afternoon in London, only 8:00 a.m. in Washington, and a predawn 2:30 a.m. at Pearl Harbor. As the seventh limped to an end just west of Hawaii, it had long been December 8 elsewhere.