At Dawn They Slept. . .
(At Dawn They Slept. . .) Today is the 81st Anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The most thorough account of that event has been Gordon Prange's superlative At Dawn We Slept , The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor. In this lengthy volume. Prange was able to merge American failures and indeed, Japanese successes, into a seamless whole, blending diplomatic history, military history, political history, and a fair dose of cryptography into a narrative that described the development of Japan's plan to send a carrier strike force to attack the American Pacific Fleet riding anchor at Oahu. There had been signs that such an eventually was possible, but there had been a failure of imagination at all levels of American policy making, from FDR to the Navy and Army commanders in Hawaii. And there had been bureaucratic infighting. Between the War Department and Navy Departments. Turf wars as to who would control the dissemination of intelligence, War or Navy ? Each had its own ag...