At Dawn we Slept: Gordon W. Prange
The untold story of Pearl Harbor
Boy, talk about an exhaustive look at a historical turning point in our country's history.. 81 chapters covering 738 pages, 54 pages of reference listings, 21 pages where he describes his sources, 5 pages of personnel involved in Pearl Harbor included in the book, 3 pages of the 8 official investigations covered in this book, and 11 page bibliography, a 13 page rebuke of various revisionists, and a 20 page index -- all told almost 900 pages. Perhaps now you know why it took so long to grind through it (those of you who were following earlier page 1 comments). You'll also know that I've already decided to warn about the readability of the book -- it is tough to get through. Part of the problem is that he introduces every last person who may have had the tiniest involvement in the event, and offers little descriptions of them -- as if we'll remember them 3 pages later, after he's introduced 15 other people. Oh sure, some big names stand out -- Yamamoto, Nagumo, Genda, Tojo -- though I must admit I remember them more if they were in the movie Midway. On the American side the big names are Kimmell and Short, the admiral and general who were in charge of the bases surrounding Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack, various senior officers, and of course Roosevelt and Truman, the presidents during the attack and subsequent investigations.
The book begins with the people who started the whole mess in the first place -- Yamamoto and the Japanese government. The attack was the brainchild of Yamamoto, who was certain that the Japanese goal of control of Asia could not be attained without crippling the US Naval forces that might stand in their way. The man handed the assignment, Nagumo, wasn't terribly thrilled with the prospect of walking up to the sleeping bear and poking it with a stick, but the man given the task of preparing the air assault, Genda, thought the plan didn't go far enough. Tojo and the rest of the military establishment didn't really want to see a big chunk of their naval air support siphoned off just when they wanted to go invade southeast Asia. Meanwhile, in Washington, politicians were busy trying to either get us into or keep us out of WWII, and even though the Japanese were doing all sorts of suspicious things in Hawaii, they didn't want the commanders there to do anything that might jeopardize relations with Japan -- all while sending all sorts of vague and sinister 'war warnings'. Kimmell, the naval commander, felt that the security of the base was all up to the Army (which was true), while Short, the commander of the Army felt that the Navy was supposed to provide the long range reconnaissance (which was also true). Both commanders kept asking Washington for more planes and personnel, all the while Kimmell was losing ships to the war in the Atlantic. Short was so busy drilling his troops, when the real thing hit no one believed it was real -- and he was so worried about sabotage from the native Japanese population -- that most of the ammunition his antiaircraft gunners needed was safely locked up miles away from the guns that needed them, and all his aircraft safely grouped together on the runways where they could be easily guarded, instead of in their fortified parking areas where they would have been protected from the air raid. Kimmell made the air raid easier for the Japanese by following very rigid training schedules that took only a few weeks for the Japanese to learn the routine better than the Americans. And of course, racism played a big part in everything -- The Japanese, like the Germans, felt themselves to be superior to those around them, and that it was their destiny to control their part of the world -- Americans generally didn't think the Japanese were ambitious, brave, or intelligent enough to do anything. Even after the attack there were people who were absolutely certain that the whole attack had been planned by the Germans, many of whom even flew in the Japanese planes.
The attack would have happened no matter what Kimmell and Short did, and in an odd fluke -- it was better that it happened the way it did. The Japanese were expecting to lose a third of their forces in the attack (including 2 aircraft carriers) -- when they finished off 2 attacks and had only lost a couple dozen airplanes, they were stunned. Rather than launch another wave (which would certainly have not returned in as good of shape as the earlier attacks), and because they couldn't find the American carriers anyway, they decided to head home mostly in one piece and ready to join the war efforts there. This saved the Americans a lot of trouble they might have had if another attack had come in. This is pretty much the conclusion the author brings up about the attack -- as for the investigations.... Let's just say if you ever need to know all the minutiae involved in the attack on Pearl Harbor, this is the book for you.