First Shot

Investigates a little-known but clear eleventh-hour warning that, had it been heeded, might have enabled the Navy's Pearl Harbor command to blunt the Japanese assault and save ships and lives. This work reveals that the attack plan of Japan's Admiral Yamamoto included five midget submarines, each carrying two men and two torpedoes.

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"If we had only known even a bit of what John Craddock tells us now, our own history could have been so very different."
--Sherry Sontag, coauthor of Blind Man’s Bluff

In First Shot, John Craddock investigates a little-known but clear eleventh-hour warning that, had it been heeded, might have enabled the Navy’s Pearl Harbor command to blunt the Japanese assault and save ships and lives. Craddock reveals that the attack plan of Japan’s Admiral Yamamoto included five midget submarines, each carrying two men and two torpedoes. First Shot vividly recreates the action on the deck of the U.S.S. Ward on the morning of December 7 as the outmoded relic of an earlier war engaged a tiny, state-of-the-art undersea fighting machine.