“Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History”, by Gordon W. Prange, with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon

699 pages, McGraw-Hill, ISBN-13: 978-0070506688

Why America was surprised so completely on December 7^th 1941 by the forces of Imperial Japan is a question that has provoked continuous study and argument. Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History by Gordon W. Prange, Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon confirms that the story behind the attack on Pearl Harbor – perennial symbol of unreadiness – can match a good detective yarn for suspense and complexity, bringing to mind those traditional mystery novels in which the gifted hero flaunts his knowledge in the last chapter before the assembled suspects, summarizing the case for or against each. And the authors prove themselves to be first-rank historical gumshoes: Prange studied Pearl Harbor for nearly four decades until his death in 1980, the year before publication of his magnum opus At Dawn We Slept, while his associates Goldstein and Dillion admirably edited both that volume and this, adding the results of new research to this latter book. Pearl Harbor was to have been Prange’s grandly analytical climax to everything he had learned and thought about the attack. As with the earlier volume, he and his collaborators identify no hidden American villain or secret in their scholarly follow-up; rather, they contend that culpability can be shared easily among nearly every involved civilian and military leader and subordinate, both in Washington and Hawaii.

The numerous pre-attack mistakes made by the Americans at Pearl Harbor are each accounted for here: weak responses to repeated Japanese aggression and espionage; confusion over command responsibility; misunderstanding of mission; poorly worded and misinterpreted messages and warnings; inadequate resources; improper use of intelligence data and radar; and underestimation of Japanese capabilities. Goldstein and Dillon have uncovered no startling new information about these blunders – individually tolerable but collectively tragic – since At Dawn We Slept was published, yet Pearl Harbor is still a valuable companion, even improving on its famous predecessor in many respects. While At Dawn We Slept is a massively detailed narrative of Japanese preparations for the attack (with parallel U.S. actions), the assault itself and the tangled aftermath of eight investigations, its chronological structure and churning torrent of events and characters sometimes make it hard to follow the ramifications of a single controversy and the successive, occasionally inconsistent, post-attack testimonies of key figures. By contrast, Pearl Harbor clearly divides important topics into separate chapters to illuminate specific responsibility. It is a sensible approach for the general reader (regrettably absent, however, is a needed introductory chapter assessing the highly variable methods and accomplishments of the investigative bodies so often quoted in the text). Pearl Harbor also convincingly refutes recent statements by the persistent revisionist school of history, whose adherents blame President Franklin D. Roosevelt not only for having manipulated Japan into attacking but also for having known of Tokyo’s plan in advance.

The authors do include FDR in their extensive lineup of suspects, and he gets no favored treatment; in fact, nobody in the cast is spared cool scrutiny, although most are cited for bottom-line competence and dedication. But basic ability and intelligence did not prevent U.S. defeat at Pearl Harbor. Among its blunt conclusions, Pearl Harbor warns that a totalitarian power able to strike first will do so if opportunity occurs, a lesson that was brought home so tragically by 9/11 and which we have yet to learn.

“New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485-1603”, by Susan Brigden

434 pages, Viking, ISBN-13: 978-0670899852

The old adage is true: you can never judge a book by its cover; and that goes for more than just the cover, for a beautiful and well-made book is no more a good book than a handsome man is necessarily a good man. New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485-1603 by Susan Brigden is the fifth book in the Penguin History of Britain and was first published in 2001, and it is indeed an attractive book, with thick expensive pages, a masterful binding and an attractive book jacket…all of which are little more than the feints of a weak man-at-arms in gorgeous armor. In The Parable of the Talents the worst punishment was reserved for the son who, instead of investing his inheritance, buried it, thereby preserving it from both decay and interest, and also from harm or loss. For the same reasons, Brigden deserves to be in that place with him because with an inheritance of characters like Essex, Raleigh, the Henrys VI and VIII, Shakespeare and Mary Queen of Scots, she does nothing much more than reiterate a lot of dates. She has no facility for whetting an appetite: not only does her book open with a needless and lengthy retelling of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (seven of the first pages), next we are retold early stories of the Old Testament, including Adam and Eve, Noah and Cain and Abel (eight pages more) before we get anywhere close to the Tudor Age. Great swathes of workaday text pull the reader down until the bog-standard of it all is revealed beneath the heathers of Scotland.

Perhaps the greatest value of histories is that by them we may better understand our own times; thus, when we read that Henry VIII developed “ways of having many persons in danger at his pleasure” we may understand why it is that we today live in fear for our own government, with its out-of-control government institutions, its nanny-state frame-of-mind, and its inability to tell its asshole from a hole in the ground. Brigden points out that “non-parliamentary taxes” in Tudor times were couched in appeasing terms: a “loving contribution” or a “benevolence”; today our betters in government command us to purchase unaffordable health insurance for our own good (made unaffordable by government’s actions, to boot) while spoilt celebrities invite us (as if we were all together with them we were united against a common foe) to reduce our “carbon footprint” while theirs is immense. Brigden never draws such illustrative parallels and this makes her book inoffensive, but boring; it’s too much Lollards and Eucharist and not enough Renaissance and Protestants. There is no amazement at any level at evil or of predatory power: “Wolsey counselled the judges to advise the King that a lawful right might not always accord with justice” on pg. 163, while “It was characteristic of this regime to bring in starker changes under cover of moderation and traditionalism, and then, having offered reform, to attempt to suppress the diversity and license which that reform had encouraged” on pg. 189. I was more enthralled reading the phone book than New Worlds, Lost Worlds.