Isoroku Yamamoto's sleeping giant quote

Naval Marshal General Isoroku Yamamoto

Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto is portrayed at the very end of the 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora!, and in the 2001 film Pearl Harbor, as saying after his attack on Pearl Harbor, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." The supposed quotation was abbreviated in the film Pearl Harbor (2001), where it merely read, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant."

The line serves as a dramatic ending to the depiction of the attack, but it has yet to be verified that Yamamoto ever said this (although it may well have encapsulated many of his real feelings about the attack). Neither At Dawn We Slept, the definitive history of the Pearl Harbor attack by Gordon Prange, nor The Reluctant Admiral, the definitive biography of Yamamoto in English by Hiroyuki Agawa, contain the line.

Randall Wallace, the screenwriter of Pearl Harbor, readily admitted that he copied the line from Tora! Tora! Tora! The director of 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. Williams, in turn, has stated that Larry Forrester, the screenwriter, found a 1943 letter from Yamamoto to the Admiralty in Tokyo containing the quotation. However, Forrester cannot produce the letter, nor can anyone else, American or Japanese, recall or find it.

It is true that Yamamoto 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 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. It is recorded 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, thus making the incident an unprovoked sneak attack that would certainly enrage the enemy.

Similar sayings

In The Reluctant Admiral, Hiroyuki Agawa, without a citation, does give a quotation from a reply by Admiral Yamamoto to Ogata Taketora on January 9, 1942, which is strikingly similar to the famous version: "A military man can scarcely pride himself on having 'smitten a sleeping enemy'; it is more a matter of shame, simply, for the one smitten. I would rather you made your appraisal after seeing what the enemy does, since it is certain that, angered and outraged, he will soon launch a determined counterattack."

The other common quotation attributed to Yamamoto predicting the future outcome of a naval war against the United States is: "I can run wild for six months … after that, I have no expectation of success". As it happened, the Battle of Midway, the critical naval battle considered to be the turning point of the war in the Pacific, indeed did occur six months after Pearl Harbor (Midway ended on June 7th, exactly 6 months later).

Similar to the above quotation was another quotation that, while real, was widely misinterpreted in the US press. Yamamoto, when once asked his opinion on the war, pessimistically said that the only way for Japan to win the war was to dictate terms in the White House (which would have required them to eventually invade the United States and march across the country, fighting their way to Washington — i.e. Japan would have had to conquer the whole of the United States). Yamamoto's meaning was that military victory, in a protracted war against an opponent with as much of a population and industrial advantage as the United States possessed, was completely impossible — a rebuff to those who thought that winning a major battle against the US Navy would end the war. However, in the US, his words were recast as a jingoistic boast that he would dictate peace terms at the White House.

After the war, a similar rumor disseminated among Occupation insiders that upon learning the attack had been a success, Admiral Yamamoto had said to those around him, "Gentlemen, we have just kicked a rabid dog." This would have been a tactical metaphor and not intended as an insult, since he was generally fond of America and Americans.

References

• Prange, Gordon; Donald M. Goldstein, Katherine V. Dillon (1991). At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor. New York City: Viking. ISBN 0-07-050669-8. 
• Agawa, Hiroyuki (1979) [1969]. John Bester. ed. The Reluctant Admiral: Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy (1st English ed.). New York: Kodansha International. ISBN 0-87011-355-0. 
• Suid, Lawrence H. (December 1964). "‘A Terrible Resolve’". Proceedings of the Naval Institute 543 (94 (6412)).