Tora tora tora : Taiheiyō sensō wa kōshite hajimatta

by Gordon W. Prange

Tankobon Softcover

About the author

A graduate of the University of Iowa, from where he received his Ph.D. in 1937, Gordon Prange began his teaching career as a professor of history at the University of Maryland. In 1942, he was granted a leave of absence from the University to embark on a wartime career as an officer in the United States Navy. Sent to Japan in 1945 as a member of the American Occupation Forces, after completing his Navy service he continued in Japan as a civilian from 1946 to 1951 as chief of General Douglas MacArthur's 100-person historical staff. When censorship of the Japanese media by Allied Forces was lifted in 1949 and the Civil Censorship Detachment disestablished, Professor Prange, recognizing the historical significance of the CCD material, arranged for its shipment to the University of Maryland. The materials arrived at the University in 1950. On September 15, 1978, the Board of Regents of the University of Maryland passed a motion to name the collection the 'Gordon W. Prange Collection: The Allied Presence in Japan, 1945-1952.' Professor Prange continued to teach at the University of Maryland until several months before his death on May 15, 1980. He is still remembered by alumni as one of the University's truly great teachers, and is well known today for major works on the war in the Pacific, particularly Tora! Tora! Tora!" The Terrapin, the University of Maryland's yearbook, said of his World War I and World War II history lectures in 1964: "Students flock to his class and sit enraptured as he animates the pages of twentieth century European history through his goosesteps, 'Seig Heils', 'Achtungs', machine gun retorts and frantic gestures.

Dr. Prange's manuscript about the attack on Pearl Harbor is credited as the basis for the screenplay Tora! Tora! Tora!, filmed in 1970 while Prange took a leave of absence from the University of Maryland to serve as technical consultant during its filming. His extensive research into the attack on Pearl Harbor was the subject of a PBS television program in 2000, "Prange and Pearl Harbor: A Magnificent Obsession", and was acclaimed "a definitive book on the event" by The Washington Post.

Reviews

[Paul Haspel · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Tora! Tora! Tora!” is Japanese for “Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!” – and it was this code phrase by which, on December 7, 1941, a Japanese naval air officer, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, signalled that the Imperial Japanese forces' plan for launching an attack against the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, had achieved complete surprise. There were no fighters aloft to defend the warships in the harbor. Aircraft were parked close together, vulnerable to bomb attack. Anti-aircraft batteries were not manned. The story of the Pearl Harbor attack is a tragic story of how two nations descended into war – and author Gordon W. Prange tells this story exceedingly well in his 1963 book Tora, Tora, Tora! The Untold Story Behind the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor.

Historian Gordon Prange seems to have been destined to become a pre-eminent World War II scholar. Born in Iowa, Prange engaged in graduate study at the University of Berlin in the mid-1930’s, and had the chance to witness Hitler’s cruelty, tyranny, and warmongering at close range. He interrupted his work as a history professor at the University of Maryland to serve in the United States Navy during the Second World War, with the rank of Chief Historian on General Douglas MacArthur’s staff in Occupied Japan after the war’s conclusion. Fluent in Japanese, blessed with a thoroughgoing knowledge of the intricacies of Japanese culture, and indefatigable as a researcher, Prange diligently sought out first-hand testimony from both Japanese and American participants in the Pearl Harbor campaign, and Tora, Tora, Tora! was the first fruits of his vast and comprehensive research.

Compared with the vast scope of the later Pearl Harbor books that would later be associated with Prange’s name – At Dawn We Slept (1981), Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History (1986), December 7, 1941: The Day the Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor (1988) – Tora, Tora, Tora! is modest indeed: it was published as two long articles in the November and December 1963 issues of Reader’s Digest, and was later published in book form by the magazine’s book-publishing subsidiary in Pleasantville, New York.

But I wanted to seek out Prange’s original Tora, Tora, Tora! for two reasons. The first is that this very short book was one of the works that inspired the film Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), a U.S./Japanese co-production that remains one of the best and most historically accurate World War II films ever made. The second is that all of the books listed above were compiled in part by Prange’s research assistants and published after the historian’s death in 1980. With the original Tora, Tora, Tora!, I thought I might get Prange’s view of the Pearl Harbor attack in its purest and most undiluted form – and in that expectation, I was not disappointed.

Prange begins Tora, Tora, Tora! by describing “the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor” as “an act of utter treachery from which the Japanese did not shrink. Indeed, this operation was a fantastic military gamble upon which a desperate nation had elected to stake its future.” Viewers of the 1970 film will not be surprised to hear of the book’s emphasis on how “The plan to strike Pearl Harbor had been conceived and pushed through against all opposition by the commander in chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto.” Prange writes sympathetically about this man who would become one of the most formidable enemies of the United States, stating that the circumstances that made Yamamoto an enemy of the U.S.A. were highly ironic --

for Yamamoto was a brilliant strategist who was flatly opposed to war with the United States. He had seen America’s industrial might at firsthand when he studied at Harvard University, and later when he served as a naval attaché in Washington. “If I am told to fight regardless of the consequences,” he informed the Japanese premier in the fall of 1940, “I shall run wild for the first six months, but I have utterly no confidence for the second and third years. I hope you will endeavor to avoid a Japanese-American war.”

Indeed, Prange calls Yamamoto “a prisoner of history”. One detects echoes of earlier historians – Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus, Gibbon – in the emphasis Prange places on describing the leading figures in great wars, as when he describes Yamamoto’s face: “Full-lipped, straight-nosed and large-eyed, with gray hair worn in an uncompromising crew cut, it is the face of a man of action, of immense willpower.” The description could have been of a commander at Marathon, or Syracuse, or the Teutoberg Forest.

In planning the Pearl Harbor attack, Yamamoto worked closely with Commander Minoru Genda, the brilliant tactician for the Japanese Navy’s air arm, who declared Yamamoto’s plan for a Pearl Harbor attack “difficult, but not impossible.” Genda and Yamamoto worked with an able group of subordinates on tactical innovations like the development of a new kind of torpedo that would not plunge into the mud of 40-foot-deep Pearl Harbor, but would instead be able to strike targets like the big battleships that were moored side by side at the harbor’s “Battleship Row.”

At a strategic conference in which Japanese Army militarists emphasized war rather than diplomacy, Japanese Emperor Hirohito, who by tradition never spoke at such conferences, spoke up and read a poem, “The Four Sides of the Sea,” that had been written by his grandfather, Emperor Meiji:

“I think all the people of the world
are brethren.
Then why are the waves and winds
so unsettled today?”

Thus the emperor, who could not dictate policy and did not even know of plans for an attack on Pearl Harbor, expressed his hopes that his grandfather’s spirit of peacemaking could be introduced into the tense international situation between Japan and the U.S.A.

Admirals wedded to theories of battleship warfare resisted, but Yamamoto got his way. At an October conference on the quarterdeck of the flagship Nagato, Yamamoto heard out the admirals’ misgivings and then made a brief, simple statement: “So long as I am commander in chief of the combined fleet, Pearl Harbor will be attacked” (p. 269). He also informed higher authorities in the Navy that he would resign, and take his entire staff with him, if the plan was not approved. From that time, the Japanese armed forces were committed to the Pearl Harbor plan.

Prange also places strong emphasis on the role of Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, a man who “had the reputation of being the hardest-working officer in the Japanese navy” (p. 278). Prange states that Fuchida’s “warmth and personal magnetism commanded almost idolatrous loyalty from his pilots”, and suggests that these traits made Fuchida an ideal commander to lead the planes in their attack on Pearl Harbor.

Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, the leader of the carrier battle group, had severe reservations about the attack; but on December 1, the fleet, en route to Hawaii, received the message “Climb Mount Niitaka” – a signal that negotiations between the governments of Imperial Japan and the United States of America had not been successful, and that the Pearl Harbor attack would go forward.

Prange conveys the suspenseful quality of the events leading up to the attack, as when a radar station actually detected the presence of a large group of airplanes north of Hawaii, phoned the sighting in, and were told, "Don’t worry about it." As Prange points out, “It was then about 7:15. Fuchida and his powerful aerial armada were 45 minutes away. There was still time for American forces to be alerted, for the pilots to jump into their planes and go out to meet the invader, for the sailors to man the ships’ guns and make short work of [the] awkward torpedo bombers. It was the last chance for U.S. forces in Hawaii – and it eluded them.”

Fuchida, in his lead plane, watched the sunrise burst through the high clouds above Hawaii. “Always on the watch for omens, Fuchida reflected that never had the symbolic Rising Sun appeared more auspicious for Japan….To his anxious superiors on the [aircraft carrier] Akagi and in Tokyo, Fuchida radioed a reassuring, “Tora, Tora, Tora!” (Tiger, Tiger, Tiger!) It was the pre-arranged code word for conveying the news that complete surprise had been achieved. (p. 299)

Part 1 of Tora, Tora, Tora! ends at this point, and Part 2 takes up on the American side, with “Adm. Husband E. Kimmel, the able and energetic commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet,” whom Prange describes as “Abstemious by habit, and ‘Navy’ from keel to mast.” As with Yamamoto, so with Kimmel, Prange describes his subject with sympathy, particularly when focusing on Kimmel’s experience witnessing the beginning of the Pearl Harbor attack:

For what must have been the longest two minutes of his life, Kimmel stood rooted in his yard at Makalapa Heights and, still waiting for his car, watched Japanese bombers and fighters sweep over Pearl Harbor like vampire bats. He could scarcely have known it as he stood there dazed by pain, grief and horrified disbelief, but an age in the Pacific was dying before his eyes— and with it his professional career…. Numb and stricken, Kimmel dashed into his headquarters, his face a mask of bleak incomprehension as he tried to pull himself together amid the tumbling ruins of his world.

Prange describes well how “For most Americans who were caught in the horror and bewilderment of the initial Japanese onslaught, the experience was momentarily paralyzing.” But the training these American military personnel had received served them well, even under circumstances of profound stress and dislocation. Logan Ramsey, operations officer of the Naval air staff on Ford Island, was first to announce the attack to the world. At first, he thought a squadron commander was committing “about 16 safety violations” by flying low over Ford Island. But once he saw the plane drop a delayed-action bomb, he “dashed across the corridor and told all the radiomen on duty to send out the following message in plain English: ‘Air raid, Pearl Harbor. This is no drill.’”

And thus it was that one of the most famous radio messages ever dispatched clicked over the air waves – whether or not, as military legend holds it, Ramsey originally placed a seven-letter participle – an “-ing” verb form that begins with the letter “F” – between “no” and “drill.” Either way, Ramsey’s message was, as Prange puts it, “the word that woke the United States from her long sleep.”

One of the core moments from the Pearl Harbor story is, of course, the destruction of the battleship U.S.S. Arizona; of the 2403 Americans killed at Pearl Harbor, almost half – 1,177 – died when a high-altitude bomb penetrated the battleship’s armored decks and exploded in the ship’s forward powder magazine. Prange places appropriate emphasis on this grim moment, telling how Lieutenant Commander Charles Coe saw to the safety of his family and then

was suddenly immobilized by a terrible shock wave as the battleship Arizona blew up. This indescribably heavy movement of air was followed by a deafening roar, and superstructure parts, steel plating and other debris rained down on the lawn. One brick-size chunk of armor plate came through two layers of wood in his garage and lodged on the bumper of his car.

It is impossible not to think of such moments when visiting Pearl Harbor and taking the motor launch out to the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial atop the sunken battleship. Oil from the stricken ship’s fuel tanks still floats up to the surface, more than 80 years later.

Prange returns to his emphasis on Admiral Kimmel’s unhappy situation, remarking that as the attack went on and on,

a groan of anguish was wrung from Kimmel’s lips….Much as the loss of his ships grieved him, what really tore at Kimmel’s brave heart was the death of his men. The United States lost at Pearl Harbor more lives than she had lost by naval action in the Spanish-American War and World War I combined. These men were not neat rows of statistics to Kimmel. He probably knew most of them by sight, hundreds by name, and many were his personal friends. And all of them, from the seasoned commanders on their bridges to the greenest sailors in the holds, were his men, his responsibility.

At one point, a spent bullet broke through the glass of a window at Kimmel’s headquarters building, and struck the admiral’s uniform harmlessly. “It would have been merciful had it killed me,” Kimmel remarked. Like Yamamoto, Kimmel emerges from the pages of Tora, Tora, Tora! as a "prisoner of history."

Prange captures the Japanese elation at the successful execution of the Pearl Harbor attack plan, although with an eye toward the future: “As Fuchida winged his way back to the Akagi, aglow with satisfaction, he had no way of foreseeing the ultimate effect of the terrible thunderbolt he had hurled into the American camp. That he had awakened a slumbering giant and thus irrevocably changed the course of Japanese history, he did not once suspect.”

Prange also looks ahead to future events of the Second World War when he describes how Lt. Fusata Iida, a pilot in the second attack wave, had announced his intention of deliberately crashing his plane into an enemy target if it suffered catastrophic damage during the attack. When his fuel lines were struck, and Lt. Iida knew that he could not return to the waiting aircraft carriers, he deliberately crashed his plane into a burning hangar at Kaneohe Air Base, in what Prange aptly calls “a grim foreshadowing of the deadly Kamikaze attacks to appear later in the war.”

Another aspect of the attack to which Prange pays due attention is Admiral Nagumo’s fateful decision not to launch a 3rd attack that might have inflicted even more devastating damage: “Perhaps he felt his greatest contribution to Japan’s overall war plan would be to bring back his task force intact, since other pressing tasks were awaiting it.” With his sympathy for the difficulties that commanders face when making battlefield decisions, Prange suggests that “Part of Admiral Nagumo’s caution stemmed from the fact that Japan was fighting a poor man’s war. It is much easier to be bold and aggressive if you can afford it.”

And as Tora, Tora, Tora! moves toward its conclusion, Prange returns once again to the perspective of Admiral Yamamoto, the tactical mastermind behind Pearl Harbor:

Through all the ceremony and celebration, the silence of one man was noticeable. Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, though obviously pleased and in good spirits, stood apart from the exuberant conviviality and mutual back-slapping. His eyes were fixed warily on the future. “Your operation against Pearl Harbor was a great success,” he told the victorious sailors. “But you must scrupulously guard against smugness. There are many more battles ahead.”

Prange concludes Tora, Tora, Tora! by summing up how the attack might be viewed from both U.S. and Japanese perspectives. From the Japanese point of view, Prange writes that “The tremendous gamble at Pearl Harbor had paid off with the greatest victory the Japanese were fated to win. The long and agonizing war which ensued was fought with all the skill and bravery which was their glory and the senseless brutality which was their bane, but never again would Hirohito’s army or navy touch the heights of that first attack. For never again would they have the time to exploit fully their national gift of painstaking craftsmanship, exquisite design and ceaseless patience.”

Prange then turns to the American point of view on the attack, writing that “For the American people who live in the new age of serious international tensions and unimaginable nuclear power, Pearl Harbor remains an imperative lesson in war. It also underscores one of history’s bitter truths: the unexpected can happen and often does.”

And “on December 7, 1941, a great nation rose up in wrath and began the long, bloody struggle to drive the Japanese back to their island home.”

When Tora, Tora, Tora! appeared in the pages of Reader’s Digest in November and December 1963 – itself a momentous and tragic time in U.S. history, as the nation dealt with the shock and grief stemming from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy – many readers no doubt appreciated Prange’s gifts for quick and incisive characterization, as well as the historian’s lean, taut, suspenseful narration of the Pearl Harbor saga.

It is no wonder that Hollywood came calling, with ideas for an epic film about Pearl Harbor based on Prange’s writings. Prange served as a consultant on the film Tora! Tora! Tora!, and the film’s meticulous re-creation of the events of December 7, 1941, still impresses the modern viewer. The better you know Pearl Harbor, the more you will enjoy the film. I saw it when I was 9 years old, on the big Cinerama curved screen at the Uptown Theatre in Washington, D.C. It was the first “real” movie I ever saw, and it enthralled and terrified me.

Once his work on the film was done, Prange returned to the University of Maryland, and to his teaching career in College Park, where his World War II history courses were so widely popular that they had to be held in extra-large lecture halls, to accommodate the curiosity-seekers who squeezed in alongside local dignitaries to hear Dr. Prange recount, with eloquence and passion, the history he had not only witnessed but lived. So dedicated was Dr. Prange to his teaching, so meticulous was his research, that, as mentioned above, the three Pearl Harbor books mentioned above did not get published until after his death. They are brilliant and thorough – and so detailed that all but the most dedicated readers of World War II history may feel as though they are getting bogged down in all the names of people and places and events. Tora, Tora, Tora!, while it is not easy to access – I ordered it through the Interlibrary Loan service of George Mason University – may be the greatest single distillation of the work of this great historian.