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(More customer reviews)This is the second volume of the unpublished research papers of the late Gordon Prange, the pre-eminent American historian of the Pearl Harbor attack. Working papers are not usually published, but the situation is not usual.
Navies generate vast quantities of documents, but many of the Japanese papers were destroyed during the war or deliberately right at the end. Prange was a historian on the staff of the Supreme Allied Commander after the peace, and he was able to get Japanese officers, notably Chihaya Masataka, to collect remaining records and interview survivors.
These papers were used in "At Dawn We Slept" and other books. Prange was notoriously dilatory about finishing a book. His associates Goldstein and Dillon have made a cottage industry out of repackaging the papers Prange left.
That's not unheard of, but "The Pearl Harbor Papers" (1993) and this volume presumably take it about as far as it can go.
The most interesting and important document in this volume is the diary of Ambassador Nomura for the last half of 1941. It appears that Nomura has been overpraised by American historians as a peacemaker and a reasonable man.
Part of the diary of Marquis Kido also holds interest. He appears to have been one of the few levelheaded men in Japan at the time, or perhaps this is just an artifact of the reserve of the high-placed courtier.
Statements by Admirals Ozawa and Kondo do nothing to dispel the notion that they did not know what they were doing.
The editors say that these documents will serve "scholars and buffs." Mere buffs are not likely to make it through the whole volume, though serious students will be instructed. It is interesting, for example, that as late as 1947, the Japanese navy still did not know when it sank the carrier Lexington.
The editing is marred by hundreds of "(sics)," most of them not needed and scores of them (especially in Nomura's diary), betraying the fact that somebody doesn't understand English grammar.
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The Pacific War Papers is an annotated collection of extremely rare Japanese primary-source documents, translated into English, that provides an invalu-able resource for historians and students of World War II. These naval and diplomatic documents come from the collection of the late Gordon Prange, the eminent scholar of Pearl Harbor, who obtained them from Japanese naval leaders while working for the Military History Section of the American forces that occupied Japan. Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon have assembled this collection so that these important documents are not lost to history. The editors also provide expert commentary to introduce and explain the importance of the materials. This book forms the companion volume to The Pearl Harbor Papers: Inside the Japanese Plans (Brassey's, Inc., 1993), which Goldstein and Dillon also edited. Most of the documents published here are not available anywhere else, with many translated for the first time. This edited collection covers three main topics: the Japanese navy before World War II, prewar diplomacy and politics, and Japanese naval operations and policy during the war. The documents include diary extracts and candid, short monographs written by high-ranking Japanese officers immediately after the war. They shed new light on the vast naval buildup before the war, the development of the navy's operational concepts for war with the United States, the organization and tactics of aircraft carrier forces, and the failure of Japanese submarine operations. No World War II library will be complete without this important volume.
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