December 7, 1941, 7:55 A.M.: a low-flying Japanese plane zooms over the Hawaiian island of Oahu. It passes directly above a sandlot baseball field. The tail gunner waves at the kids below, warning them to take cover before bombs begin to fall. It's an extraordinary moment--a moviemaker's dream--and, as Socrates once observed of a far different subject, "it has the very great advantage of being a fact and not a fiction."
The ball-game scene represents one of many accurate anecdotes in Pearl Harbor. Some come from histories, others from the nearly 100 interviews the filmmakers conducted with survivors. But while Pearl Harbor gets a lot of things right, it gets others wrong, and finally doesn't paint a clear picture of the attack or the political events leading to it. "Overdone overkill," says Raymond Emory, who was a seaman on the Honolulu and is now, at 80, a historian for the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. "No nurses got killed. No torpedo planes late in the attack. Too many small explosions, not enough big ones." Producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay counter that they are not making a documentary. In this, they are as accurate as that bomb roaring toward the Arizona.
There have been a dozen previous American films (and three Japanese) that have significantly dealt with the attack. Only one, 1970's Tora! Tora! Tora!, sought to be painstakingly faithful to the facts--no love story add-on--and for this it paid dearly, and is remembered as one of the great big-budget turkeys of all time. Pearl Harbor, banking on a different fate, is Hollywood, not history, at heart. Nothing wrong with that, but it is good to set the record straight on a few things before they become part of the accepted story.
Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku was indeed the attack's architect, but his intent was not to "annihilate their Pacific Fleet with a single attack," as he declares in the movie. His more subtle aim was to discourage America from interfering in Japanese affairs by showing the Yanks that Japan was a force. He hoped a quick victory in Hawaii would prompt the U.S. to petition for peace in the Pacific, which would allow expansionist Japan, already on the move in China, to pursue oil and other supplies in Sumatra, Borneo and Java. Japan felt it was under a tight deadline for invading those places. When it leapt, it did not want America butting in.
As the film shows, the U.S. had cracked Japan's codes and was able to decipher secret communiques. But the "bomb plot" message of Sept. 24 was not ignored by top military brass. In fact, Colonel Rufus C. Bratton treated the transcript, which asked for detailed reconnaissance of ships in Pearl Harbor, with great seriousness. For the record, Dan Ackroyd doesn't play Bratton in the movie but a Bratton-like figure named Thurman. This is presumably because, were he playing Bratton, he would never have told his superiors that he felt Pearl was in gravest peril. Bratton did think that "the Japanese were showing unusual interest in the port," but he also thought they would not, finally, "go out of [their] way deliberately to attack an American installation."