John Toland, 91; Won Pulitzer in ’71 for ‘Rising Sun’

John Toland, a best-selling author and historian who won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for “The Rising Sun,” a nonfiction account of the rise and fall of the Japanese Empire from 1936 to 1945, has died. He was 91.

Toland died of pneumonia Sunday at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut.

A failed playwright and novelist who turned to writing nonfiction in the 1950s, Toland wrote nearly 20 books over the next four decades. Most dealt with war, including “No Man’s Land: The Story of 1918,” “Battle: The Story of the Bulge,” “Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath,” “The Last 100 Days” of the war in Europe, and “In Mortal Combat,” an account of the Korean War.

“The Rising Sun” was a monumental account of the Japanese Empire told from the Japanese perspective.

As Toland described it in the foreword, the book is “a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened -- muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox.”

He achieved wider fame for “Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography,” a 1976 national bestseller based on previously unpublished documents, diaries, notes and interviews with Hitler’s colleagues and associates. Newsweek magazine called it “the first book that anyone who wants to learn about Hitler or the war in Europe must read ... a marvel of fact.”

Toland viewed himself as a writer of “living history,” and he relied heavily on personal interviews to write his books.

Indeed, his approach to history has been likened to that of an investigative reporter. His method was to get all sides of a historical event by interviewing actual participants and then relating his interviews as objectively as possible.

“I believe it’s my duty to tell you everything and let you draw your own conclusions. I keep my opinions to a minium,” he once said.

In writing one of his historical volumes, Toland would interview as many as several hundred people.

A New York Times reviewer, however, once complained that Toland conducted his interviews “sometimes on the condition of anonymity, exasperating those who liked their history justifiable. And his insufficient skepticism toward sources led him to some naive judgments.”

Most famous among those, in the view of the reviewer and others, was Toland’s assertion in his 1982 “Infamy” that top U.S. officials knew about the pending attack but remained silent to propel America into World War II.

Toland’s support for the widely discredited theory represented a shift from his views in his previous books that had dealt with the subject.

In his 1961 book, “But Not in Shame,” he had concluded that the attack was “a largely unprovoked act of Japanese aggression.”

In “The Rising Sun,” he blamed mistakes and misjudgments on both sides. The result, he said, was “a war that need not have been fought.”

“Now he has revised his opinion once again,” a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times wrote, “and the result is a sickening, carefully documented chronicle of deceit, indecisiveness, bungling and blame-shifting on the highest levels of the U.S. government.... The vast number of documents the author obtained under the Freedom of Information Act add up to a strong indictment of Franklin D. Roosevelt and most of his wartime inner circle.”

Toland’s daughter Tamiko told Associated Press on Sunday that “Infamy” may have generated the most controversy for her father, whom she described as “very unassuming.”

“He was always interested in people’s stories, regardless of who they were,” she said. “History he saw as a collection of different stories, stories that came together to form a larger story.”

Toland, whose father was a concert singer, was born in La Crosse, Wis., and later moved with his family to an artists colony in Connecticut.

He attended the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy, then attended Williams College and had a stint at the Yale Drama School.

Summers during the Depression, he rode the rails with those who were displaced by the vast economic hardship.

In 1940, he began a five-year membership with the American Communist Party. He said in his memoir that he was advised when he enlisted in the Army Air Forces at the start of World War II that it would be better not to mention it.

Discouraged by his lack of success as a playwright and novelist in the years after his military service, Toland turned to magazine journalism in the mid-1950s and achieved success writing for American Magazine, Coronet and other publications.

At the suggestion of an editor at Henry Holt, he wrote his first book, “Ships in the Sky,” about dirigibles, in 1957. That led to his breakthrough 1959 history of the Battle of the Bulge.

Among Toland’s other books are his 1997 memoir, “Captured by History: One Man’s Vision of Our Tumultuous Century.”

In addition to his daughter Tamiko, he is survived by his wife, Toshiko, of Danbury; two other daughters, Diana and Marcia; and three grandchildren.