Yamamoto; The Man Who Menaced America

New York: Paperback Library [A Kinney Service Company], 1971. Second printing [stated]. Mass market paperback. Good. 351, [1] pages. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. Somewhat cocked. Has some wear and soiling. John Deane Potter, born in Anglesey in Wales in October 1912, brought up in Liverpool, became a Fleet Street journalist, columnist and popular writer in the 1950s and 1960s. He died in Sidmouth on 19 March 1981, aged 68. He served in Burma and India during the Second world war as a newspaper correspondent. He was one of the first Western journalists to report from Hiroshima after the Atomic bomb was dropped on Japan in 1945. His biography on Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese admiral and mastermind of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, was one of the earliest contemporary publications. Potter's most successful books was "Admiral of the Pacific", published in 13 editions and Fiasco, had 23 editions. According to Worldcat, Potter published 37 works in 121 publications in five languages. Derived from a Kirkus review: It comes as no surprise that the impassive, implacable man in the photograph facing the title page played an excellent game of poker; it is more startling to learn that he picked it up at Harvard, along with a love of baseball, many years before he conceived the idea of Pearl Harbor to destroy the country where he came to study. Pearl Harbor was his plan, his alone, and Yamamoto programmed it for eighteen months. This study really gets under way when Yamamoto fires his first ball at the Americans whose unpreparedness was not justified. Thereafter the Japanese had difficulty. The major part of Potter's book is an explicit and extensive account of World War II at sea through the attrition of smaller actions, heavier losses, until finally Yamamoto's plane was shot down. Potter's work is presented with decisive detail and a firm, retrospective sense of evaluation.