It’s futile to critique or say something negative
about Michael Gannon’s excellent book on the political climate and subterfuge
taking place between the United States and Japan in the first eleven months of
1941. Cannon based his work on documents
surrounding the events that led to the December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor when
they were unsealed sometime prior to 1999.
Apparently other books preceded Gannon’s and lay blame on the shoulders
of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Admiral Husband Edward Kimmel (in charge of
the naval forces at Pearl Harbor) and General Walter Campbell Short (in charge
of the Army there). Gannon meticulously
addresses those points and manages to dispel them with the facts
presented. And he’s not the only one to
take notice. After the attack,
investigations publicly blamed Kimmel and Short for “allowing” the attack to
take place, but after the documents were unsealed, Congress posthumously exonerated
both Kimmel and Short from blame.
We will probably never know all the facts though since
many documents were destroyed after the war.
Gannon boils it down to a catastrophic breakdown in
communication. Among his examples: Admiral Kimmel not being informed of the
collapse of US-Japan negotiations, the intelligence being gathered wasn’t
accurate but being passed on as truth (sounds familiar, doesn’t it?), and the
infamous McCollum memorandum.
Gannon presents the facts and urges the readers to
make their own conclusions. The only
critique I have of Gannon’s work is that it is not an easy read. He writes well and his presentation is
spectacular but I had to re-read several passages to understand his meaning.
I appreciate the work even more now I realize over
2400 men and women were not sacrificed just to pull America into WWII.
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