Mysteries & Myths: Pearl Harbor & Atomic Bomb (1998) Review

Mysteries and Myths: Pearl Harbor and Atomic Bomb (1998)

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(More customer reviews)Of the ten videos included in the Mysteries & Myths of the Twentieth Century collection, I consider this to be the best. Each feature provides a very good background of events relating to the subject in question, there is some pretty good footage of major events and people, and questions are posed in a constructive, non-sensationalized manner. The emotions the day of infamy still flames in the hearts of Americans make this a rather touchy subject, especially when you are asking hard questions as to who knew what and when. For such a small allotment of time, this video did an outstanding job of providing a timeline of intelligence information in the days and hours before the Japanese attack. It points out the fact that the US and Britain were decoding Japanese diplomatic messages long before Pearl Harbor, while the British were intercepting and decoding Japanese naval messages as early as 1939 (without bothering to share this information with the US). Hours before the attack, FDR had in his hands a decoded diplomatic message detailing Japan's upcoming ultimatum to the US; he knew war was imminent but did not know where the enemy would attack. The full extent of FDR's knowledge is still suspect in my mind but it seems proper that this video would not resort to unfounded speculation. What is not a matter of speculation, and the video argues the case for this quite well, is that Winston Churchill knew about the upcoming attack and purposely kept the information secret from the Americans he so desperately wanted to bring in to the Allied war effort. Turning that information over to the Americans, the video suggests, would have hurt the flagging British war effort in the Far East by revealing the fact that Japanese naval codes had long been decoded and would quite likely have delayed American entrance into the war. The video does not state for a fact that Churchill let the attack on Pearl Harbor catch America completely by surprise, but it does present compelling arguments for making such a case. The one thing the presentation does not delve into are the clues overlooked or inanely dismissed by the military commanders at Pearl Harbor in the pre-dawn hours of that fateful morning. While Short and Kimmel were clearly made scapegoats for the embarrassing disaster, several factors betraying the local military leadership's deficiencies and limited culpability do not make it into the video. Just the fact that all of the US planes and naval vessels were bunched up together guaranteed that Pearl Harbor was a sitting duck.
The feature on the race to build an atomic bomb is naturally less controversial, but I definitely found it interesting. Evidence and speculation about the German efforts to build the first atomic bomb are rarely presented in documentaries of World War II, so I was intrigued to learn more about the limited results of the German nuclear program and speculation as to the V2 possibly being designed for delivering radioactive warheads to Britain and eventually the eastern coast of the US from special locations in northern France. All of the facts as to magnitude of force, cost, and horrifying damage are covered here, and you get some good documentary footage of both American and Japanese activities in 1945. It is incredible to realize that at least 125,000 people worked on the Manhattan Project to some capacity, yet only the Soviets learned anything about it whatsoever (which they learned from a mole inside the Project itself).
The history alone that is covered in this video makes it worthwhile, but the fair and balanced way in which it handles the sensitive Pearl Harbor blame game debate makes it stand out among all of its companion volumes in this valuable collection devoted to twentieth century myths and mysteries.

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