ABSTRACT
A week after the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor the American public still knew very little about the extent of the damage and losses. The Navy had released reports of major damage to two battleships, the USS Oklahoma and the USS West Virginia, and the loss of a destroyer and a minesweeper. The Japanese had claimed the sinking of the battleship Arizona and severe damage to eight ships. Reports from the Philippines were almost uniformly upbeat. The Sunday papers carried the story of the Philippine Army wiping out Japanese forces that had gained a foothold in western Luzon. The same paper offered a colorful tale of hundreds of Japanese paratroopers swooping down in the mountains of north central Luzon a hundred miles north of Manila. After these glowing reports, the War Department communique was surprisingly uninformative. It said the Japanese ground activity on Luzon was sporadic and unimportant.
