At 7:53 a.m. on December 7, 1941, the flight leader Mitsuo Fuchida shouted into his plane’s radio a signal that went straight into history: “Tora! Tora! Tora!” It was his confirmation to the massive Japanese armada behind him that the attack on Pearl Harbor had caught the Americans completely unaware.
This December 7th marks the 75th anniversary of that terrible morning, and indeed will set off a four-year cycle of such observations – even as the men and women of that era leave us. The literature of World War II is both voluminous and ever-growing. But if there is one book all Americans who care about that global conflict should read, it’s Gordon W. Prange’s monumental and quite definitive At Dawn We Slept.
It is a story told as richly from the Japanese side as from the American, and that is the key to the book’s overwhelming effectiveness. For it is the human drama – the epic tragedy on both sides – which strikes us most forcibly.
We may apprehend Pearl Harbor from our perspective simply as the greatest intelligence failure since the Trojan horse. And we respect what a historic breakthrough in naval aviation it was on the part of the Japanese navy, though we may still curse it for being a surprise attack, without a declaration of war. But it wasn’t until Prange – who worked on this project for 37 years until his death – that the general reader could fully appreciate Pearl Harbor as the singular strategic failure it was for Japan.
To begin with, the attack missed its critical targets – the three aircraft carriers that formed the backbone of our Pacific Fleet, and were providentially out to sea. Yes, it put many of our battleships out of combat, but only temporarily (save for Arizona, which lies there still). And the attack demonstrated that carrier-borne aviation was the future of naval warfare.
Then there were the fatally missed opportunities in the operation itself. A second attack that same afternoon might have destroyed the submarine base, the genuinely vast oil tank farms, and the state-of-the-art maintenance and repair facilities. But the excessively conservative Japanese fleet admiral Nagumo, having accomplished his narrow mission, instead turned for home.
Finally, Pearl Harbor aroused in the American people a cataclysmic fury which would not rest until the day an utterly devastated Japan surrendered unconditionally.
Among the seemingly numberless ironies surrounding Pearl Harbor is that the supreme architect of the operation – the great gambler Yamamoto – understood both America’s character and its industrial might better than did any of his colleagues, and saw more clearly than all of them that their goal of vanquishing America was a grotesque fantasy. Yet he bowed to the will of his emperor, and performed his duty with genius, albeit without hope.
I shall run wild for six months to a year, he said, knowing that nemesis must overwhelm Japan thereafter. In the event, because of all the mistakes made that day, the short end of his forecast became the reality. At Midway, six months to the day after Pearl Harbor, many of the Japanese carriers which supported the attack were lying at the bottom of the ocean, and a significant number of the aviators who had flown off their decks in December were dead. Japan’s capacity to make offensive war was at an end.
In a pinch, the time-constrained advisor might simply choose to read the central section of At Dawn We Slept (Part II: Action), which runs some 240 pages, and takes us from about November 1 until the end of the day on December 7. Though not ideal, this approach may be the more practical for some readers.