Tora! Tora! Tora! is one of the great films made about WWII. The film should be a staple in any film collection, as it is in mine. Having seen the film countless times and doing quite a bit of reading regarding WWII and the attack on Pearl Harbor, it is amazing how accurately the film is presented.

One of the major players on the Japanese side is General Yamamoto, portrayed by Soh Yamamura. General Yamamoto is a brilliant strategist who had been working on the attack on Pearl Harbor for over nine months (Wohlstetter). Working on the plan for much of 1941, Yamamoto had every element of the attack planned out to the minutest detail. In the film, Yamamoto is presented as being opposed to war with the United States. He even goes so far as to say that it would be a great mistake to underestimate the Americans. The real Yamamoto was the mastermind behind the entire attack, so why would he be opposed to waging war with the United States?

One of the main areas of debate surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor, and an issue presented in the film, is the Japanese ultimatum that was sent to the United States prior to the attack. In the film, Yamamoto insists that the ultimatum be delivered to the United States one hour before the attack is set to commence. As war is being waged on the U.S. Fleet at Pearl Harbor and the battle is nearing an hour in length, the U.S. State Department finally receives the ultimatum from the Japanese; nearly an hour after the attack began. The reason that the message was delivered late was traced to the slow decoding of the message by Japanese diplomats at the embassy. The movie places a great deal of emphasis on this piece of information. One memorable scene is a young Japanese diplomat typing with one finger as the minutes tick by. Decoding a lengthy message, in this case fourteen parts is quite an undertaking, but the movie makes it appear that if the message had been decoded faster, the Americans would have seen the attack coming and it would have changed the course of history as we know it. Let’s say for instance that the typist was twice as fast as he was and that the ultimatum was delivered one hour prior to the attack as planned. The message was sent to the Japanese embassy one-hour prior to the attack as ordered, but it took the young diplomat nearly two hours to decode and deliver the message to the U.S. State Department. If the typist was twice as fast as he was, the message would have been delivered about the time that the first Kamikaze pilot was slamming his plane into a Navy destroyer docked at Pearl Harbor. Even if the message had been decoded instantly, the United States would only have had one hour to prepare. Granted that would have helped the U.S. avoid a great deal of casualties and damage to the fleet, but there were still over 350 inbound fighter pl

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