Cinema: What Really Happened

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.”

Small point, but illustrative of the movie’s storytelling license: in early December it was not the whole Japanese fleet that had gone missing to U.S. intelligence, it was four carriers. So Admiral Husband Kimmel didn’t say to his aide, “The entire fleet could be rounding Diamond Head right now, and we wouldn’t know a goddam thing about it” but rather, “Do you mean to say they”–meaning the four ships–“could be rounding Diamond Head, and you wouldn’t know it?”

A controversial figure in the Pearl Harbor saga was a mess attendant on the West Virginia named Doris Miller. Cuba Gooding Jr.’s portrayal of him rubber-stamps the legend while ignoring other versions of the Miller story. In the movie, Miller comforts the dying Captain Mervyn Bennion, then locks onto an antiaircraft gun, blasts away and makes a kill. In reality, Miller, the ship’s boxing champion, who was regarded as something of a bully, was recruited to help move Bennion out of harm’s way. A man who did comfort the captain was Ensign Victor Delano, and it was Delano who managed to get two machine guns working forward of the conning tower, then showed Miller how to operate one. Nearly 60 years after the attack, Delano, 81, remembers, “I didn’t see any planes shot down from our ship. If Miller did get one, it was an accident. He didn’t know how to shoot that gun.” Some survivors recall Miller as more of a nuisance on deck than a hero, but regardless, the Tale of the Intrepid Messmate was passed along, and Miller was awarded the Navy Cross. He died later in the war when the ship he was on was sunk. Says Bruckheimer: “Whether or not he shot down one or two planes, or no planes at all, he was a brave and honorable man who risked his life for his fellow sailors and his country.”

We might have known the filmmakers were playing loose with President Roosevelt when they cast someone other than Edward Herrmann in the role. While Jon Voight’s impersonation has a certain fidelity, his actions do not. There are little things–Roosevelt was actually in his study, not a hallway, when told of the attack–and then there’s that whopper with the wheelchair. During a Cabinet meeting after the attack in the film, the crippled F.D.R. struggles to his feet in order to impress upon his lily-livered Cabinet the need for courage in the face of adversity. Bay and screenwriter Randall Wallace, with good old show-biz chutzpah, maintain that if such a scene did not happen in real life, it should have.

Some of the movie’s harshest critics have been nonetheless wowed by its centerpiece battle scene. It is, surely, stunning. It is also confusing: you can’t tell which boat you are on, which airfield you’re at, what’s blowing up. In a sense, this mimics the horrifying confusion of the day. But it doesn’t allow you to understand what happened and how quickly it happened: 40 minutes for the first wave of the attack, 36 for the second, the last Japanese planes heading north by 9:30 a.m. And, of course, in a PG-13 film the imagery can only hint at the gruesomeness of the carnage. Photographs from the day show the true hell of Pearl Harbor–blown-apart boats and bodies, oil fires everywhere, the sea aflame. Bay’s bay is, by contrast, vivid, colorful, almost clean.

That said, the answer to a really big question–Did just two American pilots, perhaps resembling Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett, really claim seven of the 29 Japanese planes downed that day?–is yes. Lieutenants George S. Welch and Kenneth Taylor, upon whom the movie characters are very loosely based, managed to get aloft and were credited with four kills in their first action, three more near the end of the attack.

Two footnotes: neither Welch nor Taylor was involved in the air raid against Tokyo led by Lieut. Colonel James Doolittle, which is accurately depicted in the film as a swift-response morale booster. And there’s no evidence that Welch and Taylor were enmeshed in any kind of love triangle.

–With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/New York