Pearl Harbor Betrayed
The True Story of a Man and a Nation under Attack
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
A naval historian draws on newly revealed primary documents to shed light on the tragic errors that led to the devastating attack, Washington's role, and the man who took the fall for the Japanese tactical victory.
Michael Gannon begins his authoritative account of the "impossible to forget" attack with the essential background story of Japan's imperialist mission and the United States' uncertain responses--especially two lost chances of delaying the inevitable attack until the military was prepared to defend Pearl Harbor.
Gannon disproves two Pearl Harbor legends: first, that there was a conspiracy to withhold intelligence from the Pacific Commander in order to force a Pacific war, and second, that Admiral Kimmel was informed but failed to act. Instead, Gannon points to two critical factors ignored by others: that information about the attack gleaned from the "Magic" code intercepts was not sent to Admiral Kimmel, and that there was no possibility that Kimmel could have defended Pearl Harbor because the Japanese were militarily far superior to the American forces in December of 1941.
Gannon has divided the story into three parts: the background, eyewitness accounts of the stunning Japanese tactical victory, and the aftermath, which focuses on the Commander, who was blamed for the biggest military disaster in American history.
Pearl Harbor Betrayed sheds new light on a crucial and infamous moment in history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gannon, author of two excellent books on the Battle of the Atlantic, jumps onto the 50th-anniversary bandwagon with this effort to demonstrate that base Admiral Husband A. Kimmel was made a scapegoat for his military and political superiors. The thrust of Gannon's argument is that President Roosevelt, and the entire defense establishment, were so focused on the prospects of war with Germany that the deterioration of U.S. relations with Japan went relatively unnoticed. Gannon describes Japan's decision to go to war as not forced by U.S. behavior but made in a rational calculation of Japan's vital interests. He wraps his package by presenting what he considers U.S. intelligence's failure to convey appropriate warning to Pearl Harbor in the final weeks and days before Japan's blow struck. The arguments, however, develop a reverse effect. If, as Gannon also convincingly demonstrates, the inevitability of war with Japan was understood at all senior command levels in Hawaii, it is difficult to see how more emphatic and direct communications from Washington would have produced different behavior patterns. Gannon's portrait of Kimmel in particular establishes him as more or less a peacetime admiral suddenly out of his depth when confronted with a wartime situation. Illustrations (40 in b&w) not seen by PW.
