Hailed widely by reviewers with expressions such as “a noble book,” “comprehensive and authentic,” “compelling,” and even “the best history yet to come out of the Pacific war,” John Toland’s ” The Rising Sun” ( Random House), subtitled : the Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945,” tells the story mainly from the Japanese viewpoint. He suggests that the Pacific war might have been avoided but for “language difficulties, and mistranslations as well as Japanese opportunism, irrationality, honor, pride, and fear, and American racial prejudice, distrust, ignorance of the Orient, rigidity, self-righteousness, honor, national pride, and fear.”
Toland sepnt five years on this 1970 OPC award.- winning book. With his wife and collaborator, Toshiko, he spent fifteen months traveling through the Far East interviewing everyone from top officials to peasants. Of Samurai descent, Toshiko through family contacts was able to open doors normally closed to Westerners. The couple interviewed more than 500 people, including normally reticent Japanese wartime leaders and Hiroshima victims as well as Americans ranging from foremer President Trumen to onetime POW’S.
A stateside soldier during World War II, kept by his small size from becoming a Marine combat correspondent or Air Corps flight trainee, Toland postwar was a novelist and science fiction free-lance until his 1955 book on dirigibles, “Ships in the Sky,” for which he interviewed 50 people who had actually ridden in them, brought them to the attention of Army historians, This resulted in a commission to write “Battle: The Story of the Bulge.” ( a 1961 winner in this category) and “The Last 100 Days.” His next book: a biography of Hitler.
Citation: C.L. Sulzberger for “The Last of the Giants,”published by Macmillan. He was a Class 1 winner in 1941 and 1951.