After Pearl Harbor, Rep. J. Parnell Thomas, hearkening back to World War I, urged songwriters to pen stirring anthems to the war effort. "What America needs today is a good five cent war song," he declared. America's songwriters did not waste time answering his call. Musician Burt Wheeler debuted his tune "We'll Knock the Japs Right into the Laps of the Nazis" at a nightclub on the evening of the Pearl Harbor attack; by next morning songwriter Max-Lerner had finished "The Sun Will Soon Be Setting on the Land of the Rising Sun." The sobn-tb-be-popular "You're a Sap, Mr. Jap" was copyrighted three hours before Congress declared war. As is obvious from the titles of these tunes, early war songs were usually chauvinistic and antagonistic toward the enemy, perhaps a natural response after the surprise.attack on Hawaii. But anti- Japanese songs also tended...