Days of Infamy

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

For 50 years, Adm. Husband Kimmel and Gen. Walter Short have been blamed for the unpreparedness that led to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. British historian Costello (Ten Days to Destiny), working from recently declassified documents, reveals that the two Hawaii commanders were denied information that could have saved the Pacific Fleet battleships and the lives of thousands of U.S. servicemen. A far more heinous command failure, in his view, was that Gen. Douglas MacArthur allowed his air force in the Philippines to be destroyed on the ground 10 hours after the Pearl Harbor debacle; his refusal to launch a preemptive strike against Japanese airbases as ordered doomed the defense of the Philippines before it could begin. MacArthur's inaction also contributed, the author contends, to the loss of Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies to the Japanese, because his bombers were the linchpin of a secret U.S. pact to defend British and Dutch territories in the Far East. Unlike Kimmel and Short, who had to retire in disgrace, MacArthur was never the subject of a formal inquiry. Although Costello clearly defines MacArthur's mistakes, his treatment of ``the secret deals and strategic blunders'' of President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill is less forthcoming. Photos not seen by PW. (Dec.)

Library Journal

Historian Costello (Ten Days to Destiny, LJ 7/91) here takes on the tangled web of intrigue, personalities, and politics surrounding of the tragic events at Pearl Harbor and the loss of the Philippines in 1941-42. Costello relates a litany of miscalculations and outright manipulation that cost the United States and Britain dearly. In his indictment of Churchill, MacArthur, and Roosevelt, he shows expert command of recently declassified documents and primary source material. Costello reveals that it was the loss of U.S. airpower in the Philippines, not the loss of U.S. warships at Pearl Harbor, that facilitated Japanese victories in the Pacific. (For a complementary view, see William Bartsch's Doomed at the Start: American Pursuit Pilots in the Philippines, 1941-1942, LJ 4/1/92.) A well-researched, convincing, and thought-provoking study; recommended for general collections and those with large diplomatic/military history holdings.-Thomas G. Anton, Field Museum, Chicago

Gilbert Taylor

Costello's second investigation into the advance warnings of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor rivals the investigation of the JFK murder for devising conspiracy theories to account for what happened. In its most outre permutation, the "plot" has FDR deliberately withholding intelligence from the commanders in Hawaii so the country would go into war united. Actual responsibility for the disaster is more prosaic and varied, involving bureaucratic turf wars, the substitution of the Philippines for Hawaii (at MacArthur's behest, as a strategic bastion for B-17 bombers), and numerous intelligence lapses. The chronicle of the latter, according to Costello's research, was contained in a 1946 navy report kept secret until 1993. Entitled "Pre-Pearl Harbor Japanese Naval Dispatches", it concluded that the U.S. Navy had all the coded messages it needed to deduce the time and places of Japan's commencement of hostilities--but they were not decrypted. This is not the last word on the run-up to the Pacific war, but these densely packed facts should arrest readers' interest until the next secrets come out--said to concern Churchill's advance knowledge of Japan's war plans. Did the old bulldog conceal his information from the Americans? The British won't tell us "that" for 25 more years.