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Isoroku Yamamoto is credited with saying, after the attack on Pearl
Harbor, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him
with a terrible resolve." The earliest citation for that theatrical comment,
however, is the (reasonably accurate) movie, Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970). That
quotation was accepted and repeated verbatim in the movie Pearl Harbor
(2001). However, no one has been able to verify that Yamamoto ever actually
said (or wrote) those words.
Neither At Dawn We Slept, written by the highly respected Gordon Prange,
nor The Reluctant Admiral, the definitive biography of Yamamoto in English
by Agawa Hiroyu, contains the line.
Randall Wallace, the screenwriter of Pearl Harbor, readily admitted that
he copied the line from Tora! Tora! Tora!. (Pearl Harbor is not troubled by
accuracy; among other examples of dramatic license, it shows Yamamoto saying
those words while standing on a carrier in the attacking force despite the
fact that he was on board his flagship anchored at a naval base in Japan
throughout the attack.)
The director of the movie Tora! Tora! Tora!, Richard Fleischer, stated
that while Yamamoto may never have said those words, the film's producer,
Elmo Williams, had found the line written in Yamamoto's diary. Yamamoto,
however, never kept a diary. Williams, in turn, has stated that Larry
Forrester, the screenwriter, found a 1943 letter from Yamamoto to the
Admiralty in Tokyo containing the quote. However, Forrester cannot produce
the letter, nor can anyone else, American or Japanese, recall or find it.
Yamamoto certainly believed that Japan could not win a protracted war
with the United States, and, moreover, seems to have believed that the Pearl
Harbor attack had become a blunder - even though he was the person who came
up with the idea of a a surprise attack on it! The Reluctant Admiral relates
that "Yamamoto alone" (while all his staff members were celebrating) spent
the day after Pearl Harbor "sunk in apparent depression". He is also known
to have been upset by the bungling of the Foreign Ministry which led to the
attack happening while the countries were technically at peace.
The line serves very well as a dramatic ending to the attack, and may
well have encapsulated some of his real feelings about it. It does not seem,
alas, to have been real.
Interestingly, the other common Yamamoto quote predicting the future
outcome of an attack on the United States ("I can run wild for six months
... after that, I have no expectation of success.") is real, and is
something he is recorded to have said to a number of different Cabinet
members in Japan in the 1940 time period. It was probably part of his
standard appraisal of the situation.
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