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(More customer reviews)In December 1941, Peter Shepherd was a teen-age mechanic in the Royal Air Force, stationed at a remote airfield in north Malaya.
"Three Days to Pearl" relates how a mysterious, dashing pilot in a civilian plane landed at his base, arranged for Shepherd to accompany him as flying mechanic and took off for Cambodia (then French but under Japanese military occupation) on Dec. 4.
While the pilot was off conducting some smuggling and/or espionage business, Shepherd encountered a drunken Japanese civilian engineer. Although neither spoke a word of the other's language, by signs and sketches the engineer revealed to Shepherd the size, route, intentions and schedule of the Japanese fleet then approaching Pearl Harbor.
When Shepherd returned and told his tale to two British intelligence officers, the authorities in Singapore did nothing. As one consequence among many, Shepherd was blown up in a Japanese air raid on Dec. 8 (Malaya time, which was Dec. 7 on the other side of the International Date Line in Honolulu).
Shepherd dresses up this story with a deal of circumstantial but uncheckable detail, including an impossible romantic encounter with a beautiful Malay girl named Wan. These details do not authenticate the story; they prove it to be bogus.
To believe the key events of this tale, you would have to accept that by gestures and sketches, the engineer could have imparted such information as "that he was a civilian engineer and employed by a big company engaged in metal fabrication for the aircraft industry" or that he had been sent to an aircraft carrier "to lengthen the standard racks to accommodate new armor-piercing bombs."
You wouldn't want to play Charades against that team.
Shepherd proves himself a hoaxer when he tells how he tried to prove to the intelligence officers that the Japanese target would be Pearl Harbor, a place Shepherd claims never to have heard of up to that time.
According to him, the Japanese engineer kept stabbing a pencil at a map of Hawaii and repeating excitedly, "Purhabba!"
Shepherd says he told the British, "Perhaps the Jap was pronouncing the words 'Pearl Harbor' in his way -- the way the Japanese pronounce it -- or, rather, that may be the way it sounds to us when they say it."
But the way an English speaker would hear a Japanese-speaker trying to deal with Pearl Harbor would be something like Pu-ru Ha-bu, very different from "Purhabba," which Shepherd clearly got from "Me Tarzan, you Jane" stereotypes in movies or in "Boy's Own Paper," a popular magazine among English lads of his generation.
The plot of "Three Days to Pearl" sounds very much like a "Boy's Own Paper" story.
It would not be worth noticing this paltry effort except for two things: this book undoubtedly will be placed more or less reverently on the long shelf of books designed to prove that the U.S. government really was not surprised at Pearl Harbor; and it has been endorsed by several historians of World War II who ought to know better.
Shepherd, the old soldier, does have one good point to make.
He is rightly bitter against his military commanders who let down the common soldiers (not to mention the civilians) in Malaya, and against the government of Japan, which has ignored his repeated demands for a personal apology for its "barbarous acts . . . before its government made any formal declaration of war against either the United States of America or Great Britain."
The book gets two stars instead of one, because the framework of his experiences in Malaya -- I accept that he was, indeed, there with the RAF -- is probably as authentic as the memoirs of any other vet.
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As a young Royal Air Force technician stationed in Malaya in 1941, the author was ordered on a clandestine mission to Japanese-occupied Indo-China where he heard of the existence of a Japanese naval task force secretly on its way to Hawaii, intent on annihilating the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. He also learned of Japan's intentions to simultaneously decimate Royal Air Force installations throughout Malaya and Singapore Island. After making his way back to the airbase in northern Malaya, he immediately alerted British intelligence officials of the pending catastrophe. Three days later Japan carried out its infamous attack on Pearl Harbor, an hour or so after Japanese troops began invading Malaya. During an air raid on his airfield, the author was seriously wounded. Plainly his urgent warnings had fallen on deaf ears, and Shepherd spent the next two years in a hospital.This compelling story is told in the style of a novel, yet it is true, related exactly as the author experienced it, and authenticated, where possible, by official records. Vividly descriptive, the book faithfully records Shepherd's chance encounter with a Japanese aero-engineer who, just days earlier, had worked aboard one of Japan's Pearl Harbor-bound carriers. Had British authorities acted on Shepherd's warning, Japan's plans might have been irrevocably dashed. Everyone with an interest in the attack on Pearl Harbor and the war in the Pacific will find Shepherd's story fascinating.
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