The Attack on Pearl Harbor: Tora! Tora! Tora!, circa 1930s-circa 1980s and undated

Series 5 contains notes, interviews, correspondence, articles, and manuscripts related to Prange's research about the causes, planning, build up to, and execution and aftermath of the Japanese attack on the US Naval Base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands on December 7, 1941, during World War II. These materials were gathered or created by Prange while he was working on a planned four-volume magnum opus about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The four volumes of Tora! Tora! Tora! would have been titled "Cancer in the Pacific," "Glory or Oblivion," "The Lengthening Perspective," and "Day of Wrath." Important materials in this series include Prange's extensive interviews with surviving Japanese and American military and civilian personnel involved in the battle; accounts from diaries and ships' logs of participants in the battle; notes about the Japanese preparation for war and the American reaction to the attack; research into different theories about causes and blame for the attack; notes regarding military and congressional investigations into the attack; and various drafts, manuscripts, and proofs of sections of Prange's book.

While the book Tora! Tora! Tora! was never published during Prange's lifetime, he did publish a condensed version in the October and November 1963 issues of Reader's Digest, and there are extensive drafts and proofs of various versions of Tora! Tora! Tora! which, along with his notes, were compiled and edited for posthumous publication by Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon resulting in three volumes: At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor (1981), Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History (1986), and December 7, 1941: The Day the Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor (1988).

Also in this series are notes, correspondence, and interviews in preparation for two books that Prange intended to produce about key officers involved in the attack: Yamamoto Isoroku, the admiral who planned the attack, and Fuchida Mitsuo, the captain who lead the first wave of attacks on Pearl Harbor. While the Yamamoto materials remain unpublished, the Fuchida materials were published by Goldstein and Dillon as God's Samurai: The Lead Pilot at Pearl Harbor (1990).

This series is arranaged into two subseries.