At Dawn We Slept; The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor

New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1981. Seventh Printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xvi, 873, [7] pages. Illustrations. Footnotes. Maps. Appendices (including Notes, Source Material, Selected Bibliography). Index. Gordon William Prange (July 16, 1910 - May 15, 1980) was the author of several World War II historical manuscripts which were published by his co-workers after his death in 1980. Prange was a professor of history at the University of Maryland from 1937 to 1980 with a break of nine years (1942-1951) of military service in the United States Navy during World War II, and in the postwar military occupation of Japan, when he was the Chief Historian in General Douglas MacArthur's staff. It was during this time that Prange collected material from and interviewed many Japanese military officers, enlisted men, and civilians, with the information later being used in the writing of his books. Several became New York Times bestsellers, including At Dawn We Slept, The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor and Miracle at Midway. Prange's 1963 Tora! Tora! Tora!, published in the November and December issues of Reader's Digest, and later expanded into At Dawn We Slept, portrayed the attack on Pearl Harbor, and is credited as the basis for the screenplay of the film Tora! Tora! Tora!, which was produced in 1970, while Prange took a leave of absence from the University of Maryland to serve as the technical consultant during its filming. His extensive research into the attack on Pearl Harbor was the subject of a Public Broadcasting Service television program in 2000, Prange and Pearl Harbor: A Magnificent Obsession, and was acclaimed "a definitive book on the event" by The Washington Post. Derived from a Kirkus review: A massive history--but not outscale: the late Professor Prange, chief of military history in occupied Japan, has looked into every aspect of the attack on Pearl Harbor--starting with the Japanese side of the story--and leaves no doubt that (as his collaborators and posthumous editors write) ""Tokyo, not Washington, established Japan's foreign policy; the individual responsible for the attack was Isoruko Yamamoto, not Franklin Delano Roosevelt."" There is much new material--on such usually neglected matters, too, as: the Japanese war games used to refine the attack plan; the development of special bombs and torpedoes for use in the attack; Japanese intelligence operations in Hawaii--and American counterintelligence; the nature and function of the overlapping American commands in Hawaii. But Prange also presents the well-known material incisively: the historic March 1941 Bellinger-Martin report--a plan for joint Army/Navy action in the event of an attack on Oahu or fleet units in Hawaiian waters--is wrapped up with the observation that they ""could not have done a better job of mind reading had they actually looked over the shoulders of Yamamoto."" The controversy surrounding what happened thereafter (or didn't happen) engendered eight separate American postwar investigations--and it is in treating these that the book is most outstanding. Prange goes into the nature of each panel, and evaluates its members, procedures, and conclusions; most, he points out, illustrate ""hindsight at its hindmost."" In an interesting appendix, Goldstein and Dillon summarize Prange's criticisms of the revisionist, Roosevelt-blaming histories of the attack. From first to last--responsible, intelligent, absorbing.