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On the morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese forces attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The surprise attack destroyed much of the United States' fleet

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The nine crewmen to die in the five midget submarines that attacked Pearl Harbor were the first members of Japan's Special Attack Forces. The phrase "special attack" in Japanese indicates the suicidal nature of their mission, and much later in the war the Special Attack Forces included other suicidal weapons such as kamikaze planes, kaiten human torpedoes, and explosive motorboats. Admiral Yamamoto wanted provisions to be made for the rescue of the midget sub crews, and the mother submarines that carried the midgets were to wait at a rendezvous point seven miles west of Lanai. However, the designation of the five midget subs as a Special Attack Flotilla and the crewmen's writing of last letters to their families showed that they had almost no hope of survival.
Kazuo Sakamaki felt that he had failed in his responsibilities. Upon his capture, he said that he wanted to commit suicide as the honorable act for a Japanese Naval officer, and he wrote on December 14, 1941, as part of a long letter, "Thus I betrayed the expectations of our 100,000,000 (people) and became a sad prisoner of war disloyal to my country." Before getting his POW photograph, he pressed a lit cigarette into his cheeks and branded six small circles on his skin making the shape of a triangle on each cheek. He stayed in various POW camps on the mainland U.S. until the end of WWII. After the end of the war, Sakamaki joined Toyota as a clerk and eventually became an executive and the head of Toyota's subsidiary in Brazil.
The nine midget submarine crewmen who died were promoted two ranks and were honored as war gods. The Japanese propaganda machine could make public the previously unknown secret weapon since Sakamaki's midget had been captured. Many Japanese Naval leaders had been against deployment of the midget submarines, since they could have alerted Americans of an impending attack. Despite the glory bestowed by the Japanese press on the Special Attack Flotilla members for their heroics at Pearl Harbor, they had little or no battle success even though Japanese propagandists attributed battleship USS Arizona's sinking to a torpedo fired from one midget submarine. In the book's last chapter, Burlingame summarizes the reasons for the midgets' lack of success: "The midget submarines failed at Pearl Harbor due to a triple-punch. Their own inexperience and too-brief training period, Pearl Harbor's difficult waterways and the alert, dogged response of American destroyers mitigated against success."