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The Pacific War's Detonator
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18918 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1991 |
3,602 Words |
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Russ Braley
Russ Braley was a U.S. Navy mine disposal officer in the
Mediterranean and Pacific theaters in World War II. For
twenty years he was a foreign correspondent for the New York
Daily News. He is the author of Bad News: the Foreign Policy
of the New York Times (Regnery Gateway, 1984). |
GOD'S SAMURAI: LEAD PILOT AT PEARL HARBOR
Gordon W. Prange, with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon
New York: Brassey's/Macmillan, 1990
349 pp., $21.95
Almost a half century has passed since a Japanese task force of six carriers steamed out of Hitokappu Bay--the crews screaming, "Banzai!"--and turned south to wreck the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. The attack abruptly changed the lives of a generation of Americans. Today, those who remember the shock and outrage are growing fewer.
Mitsuo Fuchida, who helped his colleague and close friend Minoru Genda plan the two waves of air strikes, has been dead since 1976, and his biographer, Gordon W. Prange, who made the study of the Pacific War his life's work died in 1980.
Prange, a history professor at the University of Maryland, never completed Fuchida's complex biography to his satisfaction. Two of his former students, who previously had collaborated with Prange on two World War II best-sellers, At Dawn We Slept and Miracle at Midway, finished this unusual book based on Prange's interviews with Fuchida and his Japanese studies.
They have produced a biography of adventure and heroism as unlikely as Sinbad the Sailor's and a lucid account of the naval war in the Pacific. Fuchida must have been one of the few combatants in the Pacific who had an overall understanding of what was happening. On another level, the authors present a valuable account of cross-cultural misunderstanding. Fuchida believed that the Japanese master race was destined to dominate Asia, and, when Hitler invaded Poland, he grew a toothbrush mustache. Perhaps it took a lapse of a half century to risk a book like this sad and frightening one.
Fuchida was a macho Japanese warrior whose father, Yazo, a grammar school principal, did not manage to attend a military academy. Fuchida's mother, Shika, was the daughter of a famous samurai who had lost his last battle, which meant going into hiding from the victors as an accused war criminal.
Small and shy, Fuchida blushed so much that his friends nicknamed him after an octopus that turns red when boiled. Too slight for most sports, he was nevertheless competitive and became a champion swimmer when he finally won admission into Eta Jima
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