![]() He decided he really wanted to be a historian. "The Cubs would be exciting but risky," he told his friends. He'd been known to do his homework in history while sitting on the bench waiting to bat. However, he was as dedicated a student as he was an athlete. A stellar third-baseman, just before graduating, he received an offer from the Chicago Cubs. The University of Iowa awarded him a track scholarship, but he turned out to be even better in baseball. In high school he was both a sprinter and a shot-putter. He was endowed with a vast reservoir of energy. He said once that he'd learned about Pearl Harbor at their feet. To them he talked repeatedly, scores of times in key cases. However, he interviewed nearly all the other major actors in the planning and execution of the Pearl Harbor attack. Isoroku Yamamoto, who'd died when his plane was shot down in 1943. He couldn't interview the architect of the attack, Adm. senior commander at Pearl at the other, some of the soldiers and sailors who lived through that day.īut his triumph was in his research about the Japanese side. Then, he was able to interview a broad spectrum of participants. Being Gordon Prange, he not only pored over them, he bought a set of them, wore that set out and then bought a second set. Yet, one of the most notable things about the book is that during Prange's years of work on it he became virtually binational.He pored over everything about Pearl Harbor that he could put his hands on, including a set of 40 volumes of congressional, naval and military reports. He planned the book's structure like a film epic with constant intercutting between Americans and Japanese, between Pearl Harbor and Washington, between land and air. As he progressed, he made his descriptions more vivid and the action more immediate. The constant revisions of his research did not dim his writing. In The New York Times, diplomatic historian Gaddis Smith of Yale characterized it as "a brilliant recreation of the thoughts and personalities of the officers on both sides who fought that day." Among the early reviews, Kirkus called it "responsible, intelligent, absorbing." The The History Book Club picked it as its first choice, the Book of the Month Club made it its first alternate and two other book clubs selected it as well. I did a good deal of volunteer work in particular."īut even before publication, interest in "At Dawn We Slept" mounted. "I made a separate life in part for myself," she said, "because of his immersion in his career. Years before his death, his publishers had given up on him and his wife, Anne, remembers that there were no interruptions for Prange when he was working on his project. His obsession with his subject was so consuming that he couldn't let it go. The irony is that if Prange were alive today, we wouldn't have the book at all. ![]() He had amassed enough material for four lengthy volumes, thousands of pages of paper and hundreds of hours of taped interviews. He mined the materials not only about the attack but also about its aftermath. Prange investigated the American side with more tenacity, more thoroughness than any historian before him. Now a piece of his lifelong study - 873 pages - called, "At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor," has appeared in the bookstores. ![]() But he had never been able to finish his life's work, was never able to finally let it go to a publisher. Before he died last year, he'd devoted the bulk of his life to researching and writing about it. Pearl Harbor became his obsession, both his demon and his angel. His curiosity began to burn, and that fire never left him. Gordon Prange's reaction to the raid contained as much amazement as outrage. The harbor was littered with the burning hulks of such American ships as the Arizona, the Nevada, the Oklahoma, the Pennsylvania and the Shaw. Only 43 of the 126 planes parked in neat rows at Wheeler Field remained, and only six had struggled into the air to fight. When the little more than two-hour attack was over, there were 2,300 U.S. base at Pearl Harbor in that early morning 40 years ago. Two tidal waves of warplanes from Japanese carriers overwhelmed the U.S. The mainspring of the attack was the Japanese Navy's air force, and the next day one of the planners wrote in his diary with exultation, "Oh, how powerful is the Imperial Navy!" 7, feeling a euphoria they would never quite feel again. The people who, in their various ways, were to shape much of his life for the next nearly 40 years - Yamamoto, Fuchida, Genda - were on the other side of the world at Pearl Harbor that Dec. GORDON PRANGE, an instructor in history at the University of Maryland, was working in his College Park apartment that brisk Sunday afternoon while his wife went out for a walk. American studies at the Un December 6, 1981
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