World War II Database

For the sake of full disclosure, I received this book as a gift from the publisher with the understanding I would review it. This is not an unusual arrangement and there was no obligation for me to say that I liked it; but since there was no obligation either way, I am pleased to say that I did like it.

Pearl is the latest in a string of books probing the details and background of the Pearl Harbor Attack. When Gordon Prange, et al. published At Dawn We Slept in 1981, it was quickly acclaimed as the definitive book on the event. The many books that followed each tried to one-up Prange and while Pearl is the latest, it also found a few ways to surpass Prange with a deeper dive into the myriad of archives. Pearl's author, Daniel Allen Butler, is a well-credentialed author and maritime historian who quite obviously compiled a vast amount of research material in his preparation for this book. He then made every effort to share as much of it as he could in these pages.

The book chronicles the personalities and political climates within both Japan and the United States in the years leading up to World War II, highlighting the ways each country had misjudged the other. There is a particularly good chapter on United States code-breaking efforts that set the stage well for how cryptoanalysis, and the American handling of it, played into the Pearl Harbor intelligence triumphs and breakdowns. Butler's description of the attack itself was extremely detailed and complete. After building a very clear picture of both the Japanese and American naval fleets and the men behind them, Butler followed them beyond Pearl Harbor to thoroughly describe the battles of the Coral Sea, Midway, and Leyte Gulf, thus finishing the story of the rise and fall of Japanese naval might.

I found this book to be extremely informative on a subject I am very interested in and on that basis alone I would highly recommend it; but I would offer a few cautions too. Each and every sentence was so packed with detailed information that, of necessity, the sentence structures were very complicated and that was a little difficult to get used to. I was also distracted slightly by a couple of non-consequential factual errors and a few misapplied nautical terms. I was also a little disappointed to read the author took the position that one Japanese midget submarine launched torpedoes at Battleship Row when, in my view, the body of evidence supporting this is merely suggestive at best. But with all of that being said, I still found this book to be an important work on the topic and one I suspect I will keep handy for referencing at several points in the future.