TTT was a dramatization of the event, but you could tell that they were trying to stay as close to the historical record as they could (without loading the movie down with a pile of clunky exposition)

As for that other movie about the events on December 7 ...

George Elliot's comments on Pearl Harbor:

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I finished the article, George approved it, and it was posted on Pearl-Harbor.com. A few months passed, and he wrote me that the story had garnered him some publicity. George was asked to do some radio interviews, and he was invited to the movie premiere for Pearl Harbor.

"How did you like the movie, George?"

"I didn't like it," he replied. "They got the radar wrong. You'd think with all of that money they could've done better research. It was just a love story with a lot of special effects."

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(Excerpt from The Man Who Tried to Stop Pearl Harbor, posted this morning on The Daily Beast)

Link - TDB

Article about a guy who flew one of the planes for Tora. I didn't know that they used U.S. Navy pilots.

http://amarillo.com/news/local-news/2016-12-06/action-10-days-japanese-fighter-pilot

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The line is a short one of those who can match what Cecil Hawkins did in his 26-year U.S. Navy career: More than 1,000 carrier landings on 22 different carriers, flew 22 different aircraft, flew escort for Russian ships during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Add another one: Impersonating a Japanese pilot flying a Japanese Zero, its bomber plane, off the coast of San Diego.

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My new bride and I had an "interesting" experience when we saw Tora, Tora, Tora in an Austin movie house right after it came out. There was a Japanese couple sitting right behind us that were quitely cheering on the Japanese pilots every time something on the ground blew up. It was weird as hell, but we just let it pass. If my FiL had been there (tank driver in the Phillipines), he would have caused a scene.

Great guy and we got along fine, but he had a thing about the Japanese. It really pissed him off when Japanese cars became popular in the late 70's and 80's. I have a good friend whose dad was also in the Phillipines and felt the same way as my FIL. After his dad passed he bought a Toyota and told me his dad was probably rolling over in his grave.

Know of a guy in the equipment industry who had a problem buying Komatsu tractors for the same reason.

I went to Honolulu age 11. I visited Pearl Harbor and it was simply unforgettable to see the oil continuing to pour out of the Arizona. Lots of Japanese tourists on Waikiki too! We stayed at the Hilton and it was just about 50/50 between Americans and Japanese. I do look forward to visiting that country one day.

Later that September, 9/11 happened. The Pearl Harbor of our day. I think about the irony of that sometimes.

Watched Tora, Tora, Tora last night on TCM. "Pearl Harbor" was on at the same time on another channel. Switched between them. It is not even close. TTT by far is a better war movie.

The commentator on TCM mentioned that TTT was a total flop at the theaters because it was too "historical". It made most of its production money back from selling its combat scenes to other war movie and television productions.

I am curious... during the attack scenes it showed a BB actually underway with old lattice mast in the foreground of the shot. Definitely not CGed at the time. Did they build full scale or at least quarter scale mock up for the movie?
Also the models of BB row were outstanding.
I did detect the super structure of BB Texas standing in for the Yamato during the last scene....

Watched it again last night. The complacency, lethargy and dysfunction of our national bureaucracy as Japanese intentions became more and more obvious makes me squirm in my seat every time I watch.

NormanAg said:

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My new bride and I had an "interesting" experience when we saw Tora, Tora, Tora in an Austin movie house right after it came out. There was a Japanese couple sitting right behind us that were quitely cheering on the Japanese pilots every time something on the ground blew up. It was weird as hell, but we just let it pass. If my FiL had been there (tank driver in the Phillipines), he would have caused a scene.

Great guy and we got along fine, but he had a thing about the Japanese. It really pissed him off when Japanese cars became popular in the late 70's and 80's. I have a good friend whose dad was also in the Phillipines and felt the same way as my FIL. After his dad passed he bought a Toyota and told me his dad was probably rolling over in his grave.

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My mother's 1st cousin was a Bataan Death March survivor and her entire family was that way. It kind of rubbed off on me after observing Japanese tourists behavior at Pearl Harbor, a war memorial outside Taipei, on Corregidor, and at a MacArthur memorial at Palo, Leyte.

Oh my grandfather, a CBI veteran, made no bones about it, it was "damned Jap" this and "damned Jap that. Could not even look at a Japanese made car without a comment. Never knew his feelings about Pearl Harbor, mostly about Burma.

I had a very good friend and co-worker in the late 80's who was a submariner in the Pacific in WWII. His brother was on another sub in the Pacific that never returned from it's last mission.

My friend had gotten a BS in Meteorology after the war with help from the GI bill, got an AF commission, and later got an MS degree in Meteorology with the AF picking up the tab. He got a great job after he retired from the AF and started making enough to pay for a trip every year to the Arizona Memorial the first week in Dec to honor his brother's memory.

When I met him, he had been going to Hawaii every Dec for 20 years and was very, very upset about how the Arizona Memorial museum had slowly changed the tone of its exhibits. Every year, it seemed to him, the museum had a more sympathetic position on why Japan attacked Hawaii and the curators had started giving more of the Japanese side of the story and downplaying the US side of it.

My friend blamed that on the influx of Japanese tourists visiting Hawaii and was very vocal with his complaints about it. During the four years I worked with him the week after his visit to Hawaii he was always in a pretty bad mood.

He had been doing basically the same job for years, and being a newbie at it, he taught me a lot about how to do my job, which included a heavy dose of how to maneuver through the "politics" of working at an AF Major Command Headquarters and dealing with the Pentagon on a daily basis. I loved his war stories!

TTT is definitely the best movie about PH there is. Historically it is about as accurate as a movie can be.

Now regarding that other movie about PH that everyone on these boards seems to love to hate (maybe even as much as the Star Wars prequels), I will say that I tolerate that movie largely because of the airplane stuff. I know the movie itself is hot garbage in terms of its historical accuracy. They did not even get the attack correct, portraying it as a single attack rather than the two separate attacks it actually was. I also hated some of the casting, particularly Alec Baldwin as one of my childhood heroes, Jimmy Doolittle.

On the one hand, I know it's crap to suggest that an active duty Army Air Corps pilot would be allowed to volunteer for England's Eagle Squadron, but damn if that was not great to see those Spitfires, Messerschmitts and Heinkels on screen engaged in combat. Then I guess the Affleck/the other guy was based on Taylor/Welch but neither then went on to volunteer for the Doolittle raid. Yet it was great to see a recreation of the B-25 takeoff from the Hornet (in this case the Lexington in Corpus Christi was used for the filming).

NormanAg said:

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My new bride and I had an "interesting" experience when we saw Tora, Tora, Tora in an Austin movie house right after it came out. There was a Japanese couple sitting right behind us that were quitely cheering on the Japanese pilots every time something on the ground blew up. It was weird as hell, but we just let it pass. If my FiL had been there (tank driver in the Phillipines), he would have caused a scene.

Great guy and we got along fine, but he had a thing about the Japanese. It really pissed him off when Japanese cars became popular in the late 70's and 80's. I have a good friend whose dad was also in the Phillipines and felt the same way as my FIL. After his dad passed he bought a Toyota and told me his dad was probably rolling over in his grave.

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I know exactly what you're saying. My maternal grandfather served in the Pacific. It was at his funeral that I was told that he had survived not one, but two, ships being sunk from beneath him. I wish that I could locate records on this or any of his time in the war, but the only thing I have is a fading photograph of him posing in uniform with his shipmates for a big group photo.

As for my interactions with my Papa, I made the mistake one day after I had graduated from A&M of pulling into his driveway in my brand new Toyota. He told me that I needed to move it to the street and to never park it there again. Of course I did, and I understood where he was coming from even though we had never discussed anything of this nature. I did ask him if he had been stationed in Europe and had to deal with the Nazis (and this side of my family is of German heritage), would he have had the same feeling toward Germans that he did toward Japanese? He said he probably would have.

I really wish that I had been able to know this man better after I graduated. It's not that I didn't know him, but my interactions with him had been as a child with an adult. It's different when both are adults I suppose. I could not even list the number of questions I would want to ask him. But unfortunately he was starting to suffer from Alzheimer's and I believe parking issue was the last conversation I got to have with him.

Wow - you have pretty much described my thoughts about the PH movie as well. Excellent analysis!

As I am sure we all know, From Here to Eternity is a great movie that culminates in the attack on PH. The special effects of the ships and harbor and airfields are not well done, but the attack on the barracks with Burt Lancaster organizing the resistance is very moving.

And my own experience regarding the Japanese echoes that of others on this thread. My mother's brother, Paul Brown '28, was captured on Corregidor and died in a Jap POW camp on Kyushu. My mother had a deep hatred of the Japanese which I had a hard time understanding growing up, because she kept responding oddly (in my mind) to some great movies I was watching. I vividly remember her being unable to watch King Rat or Bridge on the River Kwai, for instance. There was also an old movie we were watching together, which I am unable to track down at the moment, that concerned an American widow who had lost her son in the Pacific war who becomes involved with a Japanese man who had fought for Japan. I vividly recall my mother saying that such a relationship was inconceivable to her.

Edit to add: I found the movie--A Majority of One (1961), with Alec Guinness as the Japanese guy and Rosalind Russell as the widow.

In 1991 I attended the 50th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor symposium put on by the Nimitz Foundation, and Emo Williams, the producer of TTT, spoke about making the movie. For the Nevada scene they built a replica of the last 1/3 of the ship and towed it in the harbor. I remember him saying that the timing almost got messed up with the air attack planes. The Nimitz Foundation recorded all of the proceedings at the symposium but I don't recall if they recorded Williams talk. I remember he said he tried to convince the studio to buy a surplus carrier but the studio wouldn't do it.
The panel discussions were really good. One included the 2 radar operators and Kermit Tyler who was the officer they called in the communication center.

Flight Journal magazine's Dec issue is totally devoted to the Pearl Harbor attack and includes a short article about Tyler that if found interesting. A few points of interest:

At the time of the attack, Tyler was a pilot in the 78th Pursuit Squadron at Wheeler AAF.

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At 4:00 that Sunday morning Tyler reported to Ft Shafter to begin learning collateral duties at the interception control center.

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It only his second time to see the facility - the first was just a famliarization briefing the previous Wednesday.

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Tyler testified that "I did not know what my duties were. I was just told to be there and told to maintain the work." In short, Kermit Taylor inherited an untenable situation. Lacking training and supervision, he was totally on his own. . . An inquiry in 1942 cleared him of any wrongdoing.

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After the war Tyler rose to the rank of Lt Col and retired in 1961.

And I found this interesting in light of your post:

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Tyler was convinced to emerge from obscurity for a Pearl Harbor symposium in 1991, when the public learned more about the actual conditions at Ft Shafter.

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Lt Col Tyler died in Jan, 2010 in San Diego.

I might as well mention that while I was working on my M.A. at the U of Wyoming 1971-1973, my first wife (A&M history degree '72) got a job working at the U of Wyoming library. She spent many months cataloging the papers of Husband E. Kimmel.