At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor
by Gordon W. Prange
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Book Summary Information
Author: Gordon W. PrangeAfterword: Donald M. Goldstein
Afterword: Katherine V. Dillon
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1982-12-01
ISBN: 0140157344
Number of pages: 912
Publisher: Penguin Books
Book Reviews of At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor
Book Review: Thorough and readable.
Summary: 5 Stars
I. Subject and Thesis
At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor attempts to give the reader, through 800 pages of exhaustive research, an objective view of the forces leading up to, what happened at, and the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Indeed, this book is the culmination of thirty years of work by its primary author, Gordon W. Prange, and the dedication of two of his students, Donald Goldstein and Katherine Dillon. This book not only gives a full and unflinching look at what happened on the American side of the equation, but goes to great length to cover the concurrent events on the opposite side of the Pacific.
While the authors state no direct thesis (they, instead, hope to "raise more question than provide answers" (xiii)) they certainly do draw some pointed conclusions. There is no shortage of scapegoats to be had at Pearl Harbor, blame can be laid everywhere from Washington to the Hawaiian department. Special care is given by the authors to refute the dubious claims of Pearl Harbor's revisionist historians. According to the authors, the revisionist school of thought on Pearl Harbor is one that wishes to look at the incident in a completely political sense, drag FDR's name through the mud, and rely on secondary and tertiary sources and baseless assumptions.
The significance of this book is threefold: first, it offers a substaintial body of evidence with which to refute revisionist historians' claims; second, this account is significant in that it devotes a substantial portion to the Japanese role in this event due to Prange's personal history with Japan; third, it is a well-founded military history in its own right that deserves study. From top to bottom, this book covers every aspect of December 7th, 1941 in careful detail.
II. Summary
This book was written through the tireless research of Gordon Prange that led to a manuscript consisting of thousands of pages! Goldstein and Dillion edited the manuscript down to its present form of about 800 pages. The authors split this work into three main subdivisions: prelude, action and aftermath. Each of these divisions are works in and of themselves, and could stand as separate volumes.
The first of these sections, prelude, begins with introducing the inevitiability of the U.S./Japanese war. The U.S. Navy, particularly the fleet that was moved to Pearl Harbor, stood in the way of Japan's own manifest destiny to conquer the lands of the South Pacific. The Japanese had a name for this situation, Taiheiyo-no-gan or Cancer of the Pacific.
One is now introduced to the commander in chief of Japan's combined fleet, Isoroku Yamamoto. It was Yamamoto's duty to carry out for his country her desire to rule the Pacific. Yamamoto never believed that Japan could win a sustained war with the U.S., but if they could knock out the strength of the U.S. fleet in one stroke the balance of power in the Pacific would shift. Yamamoto began to formulate a plan for attacking the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor and decided to send the plan to the rest of the Japanese Naval brass to see if his idea had some merit. This is where Prange brings the reader to whom he feels is the true genius behind the strategies of the Pearl Harbor attack. Indeed, Commander Minuru Genda may have been the most brilliant of any officer, Japanese or American, that took part in the Pacific Campaign. It was Genda that drew up the first plan for Yamamoto's idea.
As the section progresses, one is introduced to the American counterparts of the Japanese: Kimmel, the commander of the U.S. Pacific fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor, and Short, the commander of the army base charged with the protection of Oahu. If one were to look at the training the Japanese troops went through in preparation for Pearl Harbor under the direction of Genda, Fuchido, and Nagumo, and the training that took place under Kimmel and Short (knowing, as they did, that tensions between the U.S. and Japanese were as high as they possibly could be short of a war declaration) one would find the latter severely lacking. In fact, this becomes a common theme through the book. When one looks at any aspect of American preparation for the even with Japanese preparation for the aforementioned event, one finds the Americans lacking in every category.
The authors best demonstrate this salient point in the chapters in which they cover Japanese espionage and American counter-espionage tactics. The Japanese used their consulate office in Honolulu as a base for their spying on Oahu, specifically U.S. ship positions and defensive capabilities in Pearl Harbor. This effort by the Japanese succeeded wonderfully; in fact, they rarely even had to break the law to do their spy work. On the American side there is a complete mishandling of the information they do have. Kimmel and Short repeatedly had intercepts from Honolulu to Tokyo that were decoded using the Magic machine withheld from them. Whoever is responsible for the withholding of these intercepts is at least partly to blame for the Pearl Harbor attacks.
One might ask, after reading the first section of this book, why the U.S. continually left itself unprepared for the Pearl Harbor strike. In fact, in the Martin-Bellinger and Farthing reports U.S. war planners have uncanny accuracy in assessing how the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor. But, both of these reports have the fatal flaw of the American reports of the time: they are predicated on the belief that war would be declared before the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. Along with this, no American actually believed the Japanese would be foolish enough to attack an American territory and certainly not "the most impregnable fortress in the world."
The second section, Action, details the events from the acceptance of Yamamoto's plan to the decision of Nagumo not to make a 2nd fatal strike at Pearl Harbor. In preparation for the attack it is prudent to note that the Japanese had to devise a new torpedo, one that could be dropped in a shallow depth of water. By the time of the attack, the Japanese, through their extensive research and training, were able to achieve an 82% success rate with their shallow water torpedoes.
The attack on Pearl Harbor goes off without a hitch. Taking the Northern route, the Japanese fleet is undetected by American patrols, and is able to launch its airborne assault with complete surprise. The attack is a complete success with Japan suffering minimal casualties, while the U.S. lost 8 battleships, 3 light cruisers, 3 destroyers, and 4 auxiliary craft. To add to that, the Hawaiian Air Force lost 4 B-17s, 12 B-18s, 2 A-20s, 32 P-40s, 20 P-36s, 4 P-24s, 2 OA-9s, and 1 O-49. The goal of the Japanese mission was to halt the U.S. Pacific Fleet so that it (the Japanese Fleet) could achieve the goals of its Southern Operations without hindrance. Pearl Harbor was indeed a success, but could it have been an even greater one? That is the question the authors pose in chapter 65, "The Chance of a Lifetime." To that question, one can only answer yes. Nagumo was urged by the two men most responsible for the success at Pearl Harbor, Genda and Fuchida, to scout for the U.S. carriers and then attack again. It was Nagumo's decision to bring the fleet back to Japan, and the authors assert that it was the first error that the Japanese make in the entire Pacific conflict. The American defense forces at Oahu were suffering from shock and bewilderment after Fuchida's savage first attack, and they were clearly vulnerable to a second attack. The second attack would have taken out the exposed oil reserves at Oahu, which would have put a huge crimp in the American Pacific Fleet's ability to mount any form of counter offensive against the Japanese.
In the last section, Aftermath, the authors deal with the actions taken after the attack. It starts with Nagumo taking the task force back to Japan. Due to another breakdown in the intelligence sharing between the U.S. Army and Navy, American pilots and ships begin to search for the Japanese Fleet to the south rather than the north where they have gone. By the time U.S. planes begin to scan the Northern sector, the Imperial Fleet is already well on its way back to the land of Nippon. En route to Tokyo the fleet is ordered to take Midway and does so. The First Air Fleet is welcomed back in Japan to great fanfare and the men aboard are celebrated as heroes.
The story now takes the unenviable task on of assigning the blame to the disaster that was the U.S. story of Pearl Harbor. Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, goes to Oahu to see how the forces there could be so surprised. He concludes that neither the Army nor the Navy were on alert for an air attack, and that an investigation must follow to see if (a) there was error in judgment that contributed to the attack and (b) if there was dereliction of duty prior to the attack.
The Roberts Commission's report put most of the blame for the attack on Kimmel and Short, citing dereliction of duty and errors in judgment on both men's part. The report, as the authors note, is a bit too harsh. It came out too near the events of 7 December 1941 to have let a proper historical perspective sink in. Needless to say, the Robert's Commission report would not be enough for the American people, more investigations would have to follow.
Kimmel and Short did eventually get their day in court, and it did not go so well for them as they had thought it would. While the blame for Pearl Harbor could not be squarely placed on their shoulder, it would not be moved to Washington's either. No matter what information was withheld from Kimmel and Short (and there certainly was some of it withheld) they both knew that an attack from Japan could come at any time, and they were both caught unawares when the attack did come.
As the authors conclude this section, they surmise that there was blame to be placed everywhere on the American side. Most of all to blame is Short. He never did truly understand his mission. His mission was to protect the fleet and not vice versa. Bloch, too, is at fault here. It was his duty to make sure the Navy in Pearl Harbor cooperated with the Army. One of the major problems of Pearl Harbor was that the Army and Navy were never on the same page. Of Kimmle's failures, the one that the authors most cite is that he never sent out long range reconnaissance from Oahu during the week preceding the attack. Washington does not escape blame either. Keeping from Hawaiian commanders the "bomb plot" messages from the consulate was a grievous error. As Prange states, "The fact that Washington did not evaluate this information at its real worth is inexcusable" (735). In placing the blame throughout the American side the authors give a fair conclusion to Pearl Harbor.
Summary of At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor
At 7:53 a.m., December 7, 1941, America's national consciousness and confidence were rocked as the first wave of Japanese warplanes took aim at the U.S. Naval fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor. As intense and absorbing as a suspense novel, At Dawn We Slept is the unparalleled and exhaustive account of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. It is widely regarded as the definitive assessment of the events surrounding one of the most daring and brilliant naval operations of all time. Through extensive research and interviews with American and Japanese leaders, Gordon W. Prange has written a remarkable historical account of the assault that-sixty years later-America cannot forget.
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