. John Toland

John Willard Toland (June 29, 1912 in La Crosse, Wisconcin - January 4, 2004 in Danbury Connecticut) was an American author and historian. He is best known for his biography of Adolf Hitler. Born in La Crosse , Wisconsin , in 1912, he received his undergraduate degree from Williams College before attending the Yale School of Drama, 1936-37. For several years he served with the US Army Air Force, rising to the rank of captain.

Toland tried to write history as a straightforward narrative, with minimal analysis or judgment. This method may have stemmed from his original goal of becoming a playwright. In the summers between his college years, he travelled with hobos and wrote several plays with hobos as central characters, none of which achieved the stage. At one point he managed to publish an article on dirigibles in Look magazine; it proved extremely popular and led to his career as a historian.

One exception to his general approach is his Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath about the Pearl Harbor attack and the investigations of it, in which he wrote about evidence that President Franklin Roosevelt knew in advance of plans to attack the naval base but remained silent. The book was widely criticized at the time. Since the original publication, Toland added new evidence and rebutted early critics. Also, an anonymous source, known as "Seaman Z" (Robert D. Ogg) has since come forth to publicly tell his story.

Among his many books, both non-fiction and fiction, was a best-selling biography, Adolf Hitler, and an autobiography, Captured by History.

Perhaps his most important work, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971, is The Rising Sun. Based on original and extensive interviews with high Japanese officials who survived the war, the book chronicles Imperial Japan from the military rebellion of February 1936 to the end of World War II. The book won the Pulitzer because it was the first book in English to tell the history of the war in the Pacific from the Japanese point of view, rather than from an American perspective.

The stories of the battles for the stepping stones to Japan, the islands in the Pacific which had come under Japanese domination, are told from the perspective of the commander sitting in his cave rather than from that of the heroic forces engaged in the assault. Most of these comman-ders committed suicide at the conclusion of the battle, but Toland was able to reconstruct their viewpoint from letters to their wives and from reports they sent to Tokyo.

Toland died in 2004 of pneumonia. He died at the age of 91 on January 4, 2004, in Danbury , Connecticut , where he and his wife, Toshiko, had been living for years. He was survived by his wife, three daughters and three grand-children. John Toland was one of the most widely read military historians of the twentieth century. His many books include The Last 100 Days; Ships in the Sky; Battle: The Story of the Bulge; But Not in Shame; Adolf Hitler; and No Man’s Land. Originally from Wisconsin, he lived in Connecticut for many years with his wife.

While predominantly a non-fiction author, Toland also wrote two historical novels, Gods of War and Occupation. He says in his autobiography that he earned little money from his Pulitzer Prize-winning, The Rising Sun, but was set for life from the earnings of his biography of Hitler, for which he also did original research.

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