A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 2005 Potomac Books On November 1, 2005, Potomac Books published Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway. Co-written by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, this was the first major book about the pivotal naval engagement that ended the Imperial Japanese Navy's offensive phase in the Pacific War since Gordon W. Prange's Miracle at Midway (1982). Based on extensive research of Japan's military and naval archives, as well as re-examining many American accounts of the battle, Shattered Sword not only tells the story of Midway from the perspective of the Japanese, but it also endeavors to bust myths about the 1942 battle that ended Japan's six-month-long string of victories over the Allies and began to see the balance of power shift to the U.S. Navy. Even though 78 years have passed since the Battle of Midway (June 4-7, 1942), it is still considered one of history's most important naval battles. When Japan's fearsome Combined Fleet set ou...

© 2011 Oxford University Press. Cover photo, US Navy On October 5, 2011, the Oxford University Press published Craig L. Symonds' The Battle of Midway as part of the publisher's Pivotal Moments in American History series.  Based on official American and Japanese historical records, interviews with survivors of the naval campaigns of early 1942, and publications of the period, Symonds' take on one of the most famous - and decisive - battles in the Pacific Theater of Operations explores territory that has been explored by countless writers (including Walter Lord and Gordon W. Prange) and at the same time explodes myths that have been accepted as fact for the past 60 years. The naval Battle of Midway (June 4-6, 1942) has long been considered to be one of the most important naval battles of the Second World War. Almost six months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, almost 200 Japanese ships, including four of the six carriers that had launched planes against Hawaii ...

(C) 1991 Warner Books When the late historian Gordon W. Prange and his two co-authors, Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, set out to write At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor , they realized that they had too much material for one book. The Pearl Harbor story, after all, is so vast and complex that, even without the ill-advised revisionist accounts and conspiracy theories that have become a cottage industry, one volume isn't enough to convey to a contemporary reader the import and impact that the "Day of Infamy" had -- and continues to have -- on American history and foreign policy. Indeed, after Prange's sudden death in May 1980, Goldstein and Dillon not only finished At Dawn We Slept , but followed that best-selling volume with four related books ( Miracle at Midway, Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History, Target: Tokyo, and Dec. 7, 1941: The Day the Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor. ) which delved deeper into topics that At Dawn W...

(C)  2012 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) Director of American Sequences: Richard Fleischer Directors of Japanese Sequences: Kinji Fukasaku and Toshio Masuda Screenplay by: Larry Forrester, Hideo Oguni, and Ryuzu Kikushima Based on: The Broken Seal by Ladislas Farago and Tora! Tora! Tora! by Gordon W. Prange Starring: Martin Balsam, So Yamamura, Jason Robards, Joseph Cotton, Tatsuya Mihashi, E.G. Marshall, Takahiro Tamura, James Whitmore. Eijiro Tono, Wesley Addy On September 23, 1970, 20th Century Fox released Tora! Tora! Tora!, a $20 million docudrama about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Naval Base and other military bases on the island of Oahu. Conceived by studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck in the mid-1960s as an epic follow-up to The Longest Day, his successful 1962 recreation of the Normandy invasion on D-Day (June 6, 1944), it received a warmer reception in Japan than it did in American movie houses or in the eyes of co...

Just as Cornelius Ryan’s three major works about World War II (The Longest Day, The Last Battle, and A Bridge Too Far) focus on the last 11 months of the conflict in Europe, the late Gordon W. Prange and his collaborators Donald Goldstein and Katherine Dillon zeroed in on the Pearl Harbor saga and its aftermath. No less than five major books by Prange and Co. deal with the series of events that occurred before, during, and after. Of these, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor is the first and most important volume.  At Dawn We Slept covers nearly the entire 12-month period leading up to the “day of infamy” that marked America’s entry into World War II. It provides amazing insights into both the Japanese and American mindsets, and, most important, explodes the revisionists’ myth that Japan’s attack succeeded because President Franklin D. Roosevelt withheld critical information from Army and Navy commanders in Hawaii.  Prange researched the Pearl Harbor affair...