Days of Infamy: Macarthur, Roosevelt, Churchill-The Shocking Truth Revealed : How Their Secret Deals and Strategic Blunders Caused Disasters at Pear Review

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(More customer reviews)There are few events that prompt as much spontaneous discussions regarding the possibility of conspiracy and guilty prior knowledge as those involving the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Indeed, there are a whole catalogue of titles dealing with the possibilities, the associated issues, and with the substance of arguments surrounding all of the varied possibilities, which seem to have endless permutations and countless variations. So too here in British author John Costello's excellent exposition, the fascinating world of this "what did the President know, and when did he know it" whodunit is deftly explored by a virtual master of the genre. Also the author of such notable titles as "The Pacific War" and "And I was There", Costello addresses himself to a welter of issues and conditions that paint an indelible picture of what he conceives to be the actual circumstances surrounding the Japanese attack.
Indeed, the author not only asks a number of interesting rhetorical questions regarding the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor itself, but also delves into the shocking related attack on the American forces in the Philippines later the same day. Why, he asks, given his being warned so far in advance, did General Douglas MacArthur allow the Japanese forces to destroy the greatest single concentration of American air power in the Pacific region some nine hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor? And, in answering the question by way of detailing the complex series of miscommunications and fumbles surrounding MacArthur's mishandling of the circumstances, the author also raises the issue of MacArthur's unlikely escape from the blame game following in the aftermath of the attacks. Seems that those in power in Washington were so intimidated by MacArthur's positive image and reputation among the press that they dare not attack him openly by court marshalling or reprimanding him. In essence, his political connections saved him. Instead, after ordering MacArthur off the island, ostensibly to take command of all the Pacific forces regrouping in Australia, Roosevelt rewarded the general with the Congressional Medal Of Honor.
Also discussed here is the half million dollar payoff that the Philippine Government gave to MacArthur as he departed the islands, as is the desire of the Philippine government to try to maintain their neutrality, an exercise in futility that may have played fatefully into the hands of the Japanese, and which the author suggests may have influenced MacArthur in his decision not to attack or save the pacific-based American planes under his command. Yet the book spends much more energy and time covering the ways in which the diplomatic and military miscalculations on the part of both Roosevelt and Churchill played almost perfectly into the hands of the Japanese. Yet it was, according to Costello, more the loss of the Pacific air power rather than the losses at Pearl Harbor that so severely limited and hampered American efforts to stem the rising tide of Japanese hegemony over the Far East in 1942.
The author writes with considerable skill in arguing that it was the combined blunders, bungling, and malfeasance on the part of Roosevelt, Churchill and MacArthur that left the western world in such mortal danger at the end of 1941. For one thing, Roosevelt had committed the United States to a secret agreement with the British to aid in the defense of the British empire's Far Eastern reaches, a pact that was likely both illegal and unconstitutional. For another, the decision to move the bulk of MacArthur's army forces 5,000 miles west of Hawaii to the Philippines left Hawaii weak and overexposed to a potential Japanese attack. Finally, the combined neglect of countless encrypted messages concerning the details of the attack as well as MacArthur's failure to mount a preemptive air attack despite being directly ordered to do so doomed the American hopes for any quick resolution to the conflict once it had started. In sum, it was the colossal lack of good leadership that led us into the disaster of December 7, 1941, and in spite of the fact that all three men are held in high regard and remembered warmly, they were largely responsible for the American failure to prevent the disaster at Pearl Harbor in a day of infamy. This is an interesting book and a worthwhile read. Enjoy!

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Double-Edged Secrets: U.S. Naval Intelligence Operations in the Pacific During World War II (Bluejacket Books) Review

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(More customer reviews)Jasper Holmes could have chosen as his title the phrase his colleague Edwin T. Layton used for his memoirs: And I Was There: Pearl Harbor and Midway - Breaking the Secrets. As a USN reservist returned to active duty at Pearl Harbor just months before the attack, Holmes was there at the start of the war. And he remained near the center of naval intelligence activities in the Pacific until the end.
My bigggest criticism of this book has nothing to do (directly) with Holmes himself. Like many memoirs written in the decades immediately after the war, this book is limited by the fact that much of the information Holmes would otherwise have been able to share was still officially secret. It would be for later researchers to say what Holmes couldn't.
The other complaint I have is that, based on what I've read elsewhere, Holmes modestly understates the important role he played in the events he describes. It's to his credit that he's eager to praise talented and dedicated cryptologists and analysts. But Holmes frequently makes himself sound like someone standing on the sidelines watching the varsity team play. In fact, he was one of the team's key players.
What could be a highly technical memoir is leavened by a light tone and entertaining asides, like his tales of trying to drive through Honolulu with darkened headlights (a feat he describes as probably a greater danger to the citizens of Honolulu than the Japanese attack was).
Any student of the war in the Pacific, and particularly of Naval Intelligence operations or the attack on Pearl Harbor, will find this an interesting and entertaining memoir.


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Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence, 3d Edition Review

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(More customer reviews)Silent Warfare is probably the best introductory text available covering the subject of intelligence. It reads like a text book, but that's because it basically IS a textbook. It's a serious academic text rather than a cloak and dagger story. This is one to read for understanding rather than necessarily for pleasure.
The book is fairly short but covers all the bases in terms of types of intelligence, types of intelligence organisation, the various debates surrounding the subject etc. It is, perhaps inevitably, somewhat America-centric. British intelligence and the KGB stick their heads into the picture from time to time, largely to provide illustrative comparisons rather than as studies in themselves.
When making a point, the authors generally try to provide historical examples and comparison, which is helpful, especially for the beginner. It also helps to enliven the text a bit.
The book is extremely well sourced and many of the end notes contain further explanations and are extremely interesting in themselves.
The only thing I feel the book lacks, and this is a fairly minor quibble, is a bibliography. This would have been very useful, especially in what is intended to be an introductory textbook. A bibliographical essay with suggestions for recommended further reading would have been even better.
Quibbles aside, this is a very good primer and to the best of my knowledge there are no books on the market that can compete with it in terms of providing a solid academic introduction to the subject. People with a serious interest in intelligence would be well advised to follow this book up by taking a look at the works of Michael Herman, which provide more in-depth coverage (especially "Intelligence Power in Peace and War") and a non-American (in this case British) angle - though they may be a little heavy for the absolute novice.
To sum up, if you have never read an academic book on intelligence before this is the one to go for.

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Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage Review

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Intelligence professionals will be very disappointed by this book, citizens interested in Presidential approaches to intelligence, somewhat less so. The author's brilliant biography of William Casey, OSS Veteran and Director of Central Intelligence under President Ronald Reagan, was a much more satisfying book. What we have here is by and large a mish-mash of the works of others, together with an original composition on FDR's involvement in intelligence that is uneven--partly because the subject did not put much in writing, and partly because the author chose to rely primarily on secondary published sources.
From the perspective of one interested in "Presidential intelligence," that is, how does a President manage various means of keeping informed, the book is a must read but also a shallow read. We learn that FDR was a master of deception and of running many parallel efforts, balancing them against one another. We learn that FDR was remarkably tolerant of amateurism and incompetence, while good at finding the gems these same loose but prolific intelligence endeavors could offer.
Perhaps most importantly, we gain some insights into how Presidents, even when properly informed by intelligence (e.g. of Pearl Harbor in advance, or of the lack of threat from domestic Americans of Japanese descent) must yet "go along" and provide either inaction pending the public's "getting it", or unnecessary action (the internments) to assuage public concern.
There are enough tid-bits to warrant a full reading of the book, but only for those who have not read widely in the literature of intelligence and/or presidential history. The British lied to the President and grossly exaggerated their intelligence capabilities, in one instance presenting a man "just back from behind the lines" when in fact he was simply on staff and lying for effect. We learn that the Department of State was twice offered, and twice declined, the lead on a global structure for collecting and processing intelligence. We learn that FDR himself concluded that Croatia and Serbia would never ever get along and should be separate countries.
On the NATO side, we learn that Eisenhower went with bad weather and the invasion succeeded in part because of a successful deception and in part because of Ike's courage in going forward in the face of bad weather--fast forward to how weather incapacitates our high-technology today. Most interestingly, we learn that FDR finally approved Eisenhower as leader of Overload, in lieu of his favorite, General Marshall, in part because he recognized that the allied joint environment required a general and a politician in one man.
This book is a hybrid, attempting to mesh presidential history with intelligence history, and perhaps this should gain the author some margin of tolerance. Unfortunately, in focusing on the relationships among the various intelligence principals and the president, he seriously passes over the enormous contributions of military as well as civilian and allied intelligence to the larger undertaking, and one is left with the narrow impression that American intelligence consisted largely of a number of self-serving clowns vying for Presidential favor.
The flaws inherent in a Federal Bureau of Investigation dominated by J. Edgar Hoover, and the lack of cooperation between the FBI and other major intelligence activities that continues today, are noted throughout the book.
Bottom line: worth buying and reading to gain insight into the challenges facing a President who can become isolated from reality by a corporate staff, but nowhere near the quality of Christopher Andrew's For the President's Eyes Only, or any of many good histories of espionage in World War II.



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Hitler's Japanese Confidant Review

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(More customer reviews)Carl Boyd has produced an exceptionally lucid and revealing book that traces U.S. decoding attack on Berlin-Tokyo radio communications of Gen. Oshima Hiroshi, Japanese Ambassdor to the Third Reich, and its impact on the outcome of WWII. According to Boyd, these decoded diplomatic messages, known in the U.S. and Great Britain as MAGIC, were pivotal in Allied decision-making at critical junctures during the war. The author contends that, because the British were unable to read the secret communications of the top Nazi leadership, MAGIC filled a crucial gap in British ULTRA message decoding efforts. According to Boyd, Oshima was covertly converted into "an inadvertent informer of incalculable importance in leading the Allies to victory." Because Oshima had a very close personal relationship with Hitler and foreign minister von Ribbentropp, had their trust and respect, and had access to their higest level secrets, his MAGIC decoded radio messages were especially revealing and valuable for Allied planners. His military experience and analytical abilities also made his detailed characterizations of the disposition and condition of German forces in Europe and on the eastern front especially enlightening to the Allies and critical to planning for Operation OVERLORD. Boyd observes that "The margin of success on the Normandy beaches was narrow, but MAGIC and Anglo-American cooperation made the difference."Boyd's book is the first detailed account of Oshima's role as a primary source of Allied wartime intelligence through MAGIC. He draws heavily on declassified National Security Agency documents recently released to the National Archives. There is more, however, to this story of decoding covertly collected enemy radio intercepts that remains classified, especially in the British archives, which won't be declassified for more than twenty years.This is a thoroughly documented, superbly written, and rich account of the application of communications intelligence during WWII. It should be a stimulating read for all serious WWII historians and an entertaining read for all others.

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Japanese Intelligence in World War II (General Military) Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a major study of Japanese intelligence in World War II by an academic.
Author narrates Japanese intelligence-gathering methods.Information was gathered from different sources: HUMINT,SIGINT,OSINT.Japanese realised the importance of code-breaking.IJA General Staff invited Jan Kowalewski of Polish Army to help break the cipher system used by Red Army. This was a new information to me.Tokyo exploited SIGINT for establishing foothold in northern Indo China. Japan was locked in a debilitating war in China and wanted desperately cut supply to Chinese forces.SIGINT ,however.failed in ascertaining Allied reaction when Japanese forces penetrated southern Indo China which led to the imposition of trade embargo and halting of oil exports to Japan.
Author says Japanese use of tactical intelligence prelude to Pacific War was good but fails to provide to details.Intelligence branch of IJN had a spy ring which operated from Japanese consulate in Honololu.Thanks to the spy ring IJN knew that northern sector of Pearl Harbor was devoid of air patrols. As plans for attack on Pearl Harbor mounted,IJN stepped up radio intelligence coverage of American military presence in Hawaii. Kwajelin DF station eaves dropped on the communication of Pacific Fleet and the US Army Air Corps in Hawaii. It established the rhythm and pattern of US air patrols which revealed that flights were exclusively to west and south of island and north where Japanese air fleet was to approach remained uncovered.Spy ring further reported water of Pearl lacked depth, an information which helped Japanese navy to modify torpedoes making it skim across shallow waters of Pearl.
At nine o clock in the morning of November 1, 1941 Japanese liner Taiyo Maru docked at pier 8 in Honololu harbor.Aboard the ship disguised as stewards were officers who served in the intelligence branch of IJN. The ship was on a secret mission. The men were told to check wind and atmospheric pressure while crossing especially how ships behaved in the stormy seas of north Pacific.During the voyage officers stood on the bridge scanning the horizon with binoculars.This was to find out whether there was any possibility of Japanese fleet being sighted by American Alaskan/ Midway-based air patrols. Japanese did not encounter any other ship while crossing. Information proved valuable as it helped IJN to plot the course of Adm Nagumo's fleet to Pearl Harbor.
Prelude to the Japanese invasion of Singapore and Malayan peninsula espionage organisation called Unit 82( which worked for the Japanese War Ministry) conducted a through reconnaissance of the area. Unit collected data about topography, road network,ports,military installations,airfields. It found British had about 200 obsolete aircraft.Quality of British Commonwealth forces needs lot to be desired.Defences were found to be deplorably inadequate.Unit gathered stunning intelligence on ground defences of Singapore.It was found fortress was solid and strong from the sea but rear facing the Johore area was weak.Not even Mr.Churchill perceived this vulnerability.
Author has tendency to put things euphemistically.Instead of saying ethnocentrism it would have better to say racism ,a quality which made Anglo Americans to fatally underestimate the Japanese. Another lacuna of the book, the author could have added a glossary section. The text abounds in acronyms, abbreviations. Glossary section of the book would have helped the reader to get quick grip of the jargons used. Due to its absence reader has to keep on flipping pages for reference.
Author is of the opinion that structural flaws hindered the smooth functioning of Japanese intelligence.Like the German Kriegsmarine, IJN thought its ciphers could not be hacked.Even after Adm Yamamoto's tragic death ,it failed to improve its cipher security. What I found appalling was lack of inter service co-operation in Japanese armed forces. IJN 's crptanalytical ability was definitely superior to IJN.It hacked M-138 ciphers used by State Department for routing its confidential messages and knew IJN's ciphers were vulnerable. But refused to share this information.Better inter service co operation would have helped Navy to plug holes in its cipher security prelude MI operation.
Final word has not been written on war time operations of Japanese intelligence.There are many things which we still don't know.Immediately after the war secret documents related to SIGINT were burned.Fearing punishment Japanese officers have remained mute about their war time activities. So details given in the book are fragmentary at best which author has managed to tease out from availaible records. Nevertheless, author has resurrected a study which has languished for so long.



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In the eyes of history, Japanese intelligence in World War II has fared very poorly. However, these historians have most often concentrated on the later years of the war, when Japan was fighting a multi-front war against numerous opponents. In this groundbreaking new study, Japanese scholar Ken Kotani re-examines the Japanese Intelligence department, beginning with the early phase of the war. He points out that without the intelligence gathered by the Japanese Army and Navy they would have been unable to achieve their long string of victories against the forces of Russia, China, and Great Britain. Notable in these early campaigns were the successful strikes against both Singapore and Pearl Harbor. Yet as these victories expanded the sphere of Japanese control, they also made it harder for the intelligence services to gather accurate information about their growing list of adversaries. At the battle of Midway in 1942, Japanese intelligence suffered its worst mishap when the Americans broke their code and tricked the Japanese into revealing the target of their attack. It was a mistake from which they would never recover. As the military might of Japan was forced to retreat and her forces deteriorated, so too did her intelligence services.

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The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century Review

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(More customer reviews)Although I am a large fan of America's Secret War and respect Mr. Friedman's logical thinking and intelligence, this book is an undertaking so far beyond the capability of man -trying to outline how the next 100 years of history will look- that even though it started off captivating it ultimately left me feeling like the whole thing was a fool's errand. It's not that the author is illogical or a nutcase as some of the negative reviewers have suggested, it's just that there's no way to meaningfully try to predict the simply unpredictable, regardless of the complexity of your analysis. And as the author stretches his future history farther and farther away from the present it simply becomes an implausibility on top of an implausibility on top of another implausibility to the point that any value the reader could derive nearly evaporates and I wish I had spent my time reading actual history.
Of course the author believes some rough prediction of the future is possible based on trends analysis, an understanding of strategic nature, and other such information. I immediately concede that trying to predict the future is not only necessary as a basis for security planning but can be done profitably over maybe 10 years, 20 at the extreme, but only if you build in a huge amount of risk management / "reserve" into your planning results to account for the inevitable unexpected. Thus my critique is simply with the overly ambitious timeline of the author rather than the endeavor itself.
There are some positives of the book which were informative and argue in favor of reading perhaps the first half for pertinent information and analysis. This information revolves around such things as brief overviews of European history and it's rise to power, a brief and plausible (though not necessarily entirely convincing) theory of a cyclical nature of American politics/economics/history, explanations of Russia's geostrategic challenge and how it has historically approached it, global demographics (birth rates declining, the reasons why they are declining and the possible results) and some highlights of the Chinese economy and political system in addition to some other fascinating minor topics. Frankly these topics could have easily formed the basis for an excellent book that tries to project what they could mean over a more modest timeframe, which coupled with Mr. Friedman's direct and straight to the point writing style would have been well worth it. But beyond this the book is more interesting as a work of science fiction than a source of illumination or fuel for strategic analysis.
Even over the relatively strong first half of the book or so there were some things that struck me as cautionary flags with regards to the author's conclusions. Mr. Friedman is Bismarckian to a very high degree, and pretty much limits his assumptions of state behavior to each state trying to enforce a balance of power amongst all other states within its means. There is seemingly no consideration of moral factors, such as alignment of like minded cultures or political/economic systems because they are like minded, in his analysis. His explanation of US grand strategy culminates in what strikes me, as an active duty US Navy Officer, as incongruous. (Which I can't figure since he has close military ties and his son is also in the military.) He essentially claims that US grand strategy is to ensure dominance of the oceans, which is correct but only a single facet of a much more variegated and complex animal. But in his analysis of how this grand strategy has influenced American action he tries to explain that this has motivated America to intervene in Kosovo and Iraq, i.e. to forestall an eventual Eurasian power from building a Navy that can challenge ours! Serbia and Al-Qaeda seemed pretty far from that goal to provide the clarifying rational of American behavior, and this explanation fails to account why we are doing nothing to forestall Chinese and Indian naval developments, and why the previous CNO and current CJCS, Adm. Mike Mullen, launched the "1,000 ship Navy" designed to reduce the need for enlarging the US Navy size by leveraging closer ties with allied nations' navies and developing their naval capabilities synergistically. He also claims that as part of our strategy of preventing a dominant Eurasian continental power we went into Iraq to intentionally de-stabilize central Asia. Again, this flies completely in the face of my entire personal experience in the military, as so many of our forces are working themselves to the bone to try to re-stabilize the region away from weak and antagonistic states that allowed the growth of radical Islam to stronger, more functioning entities that can integrate better with the world and root out Islamic fundamentalism on its home territory. Such a change requires a period of instability to go from a "bad" regime to a "good" one, but that necessary instability is a daunting obstacle being actively tackled and not a goal. (Whether what we are doing is a pipe dream or not is an entirely different matter, but I personally find his explanation of our current strategy simply false, if not quixotic.) Instead it is the overtly stated belief of the US strategic community that it is exactly instability and/or weak autocratic based regimes that causes groups like Al-Qaeda to operate. Other concerns I have with his analysis are that Iran, especially a nuclear Iran, makes virtually no appearance, nor does India. Also, in my subjective opinion, he completely under-rates the strength and staying power of radical Islam essentially claiming that is already defeated and won't even be a factor beyond the mid 2010's, and thus he more or less ignores it.
And although it is probably ridiculous to critique an absurdity, there were some issues I had with his analysis of the period of the 2040's and beyond. He envisions an American space based strategy with three very large (i.e. hundreds to thousands of crewmembers) space stations he calls "battle stars" forming its core. Each would be a command and control node as well as being armed with directed energy and kinetic weapons, and he claims that they will be built under the assumption that they are invulnerable. Yet given the delicate nature of lightweight space structures (in order to be able to get them into space at an affordable cost) and the relative ease of anti-satellite weapons to wreak massive damage on such a system cheaply, his assumption that the US will think they are invulnerable flies completely in the face of a technological reality that is already widely recognized in the US space community. Last, he also envisions hypersonic aircraft providing close air support for ground forces, which is frankly ridiculous. There is more I could quibble with his far out year predictions, but honestly what would be the point?
An odd book. Mr. Friedman has some formidable strengths that shone brilliantly in America's Secret War, and glimmer here and there in the Next 100 Years, but beyond the midway point the book sadly devolves into the absurd.

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The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is not intended to teach the reader how to design or cryptanalyze codes and ciphers; it is a history book, and a really great one. However, the reader should be aware of a couple of things that may not be apparent.
First, the 1996 "revised edition" differs from the 1967 first edition only in the addition of a final chapter to cover what Kahn didn't know (or didn't choose to include) in the 1967 edition. The first 26 of 27 chapters, and the references and bibliography associated with them, are essentially identical to those of the 1967 edition. This means that a number of statements and passages in the first 26 chapters, although correct in 1967, are misleading if one assumes they were written in 1996. I recommend that the reader skim Chapter 27 quickly before reading the rest of the book, so as not to misunderstand any of what's in earlier chapters.
Second, keep in mind that in 1967 Kahn was essentially an outsider so far as the intelligence community was concerned, but by 1996 he was definitely regarded as an insider. Hence, the new final chapter is written with complete respect for the sensitivities of the intelligence community, which the original book was not. I was surprised to see one particular statement in the last chapter until I realized that NSA wants to correct a misapprehension widely held outside the community. Much more important, Kahn now knows a great deal that he has chosen to omit from the last chapter, including much that's unclassified but still regarded by somebody as sensitive for one reason or another. He even omits certain material that he made publicly available some years ago in his written testimony to a Congressional subcommittee. So the reader should understand that this book says less than it might about various aspects of the history of cryptology and its impact dating back as far as World War II. Whether this is good or bad depends on where one sits; if one is concerned about the sensitivities of various governments, it's good; if one wants to know as much as one can about the history of cryptology since 1940 that's not still clasified, it's bad.

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The broken seal: the story of "Operation Magic" and the Pearl Harbor disaster Review

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(More customer reviews)If the words Purple, Magic, or Arlington Hall do not hold a beguiling fascination for you then please see the other reviews. This is not a book about Pearl Harbor per se. It is a wonderful, concise history of the post WWI American intelligence and its early victories with Japanese code breaking. Fargo offers an engrossing tale of how we intercepted, broke, and disseminated intelligence from the Red, Purple, naval, and commercial Japanese codes prior to December 7th. This is a story about the birth pangs of modern intelligence, culminating in the failure to forecast the attack on Pearl. Fargo details the insights we had into Japanese foreign policy and the vagaries of 1930's espionage/counter espionage quite well. His first hand experience (he worked for ONI under Zacharias), access to sources, and first rate research still make this a great read, even though it is a bit dated. But it is not for just anybody.

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Day of Deceit : The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor Review

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(More customer reviews)Day of Deceit is a well documented account of the Roosevelt administration's efforts to provoke the Japanese into attacking the US to have an excuse to enter the war against Germany. No progressive democrat or reactionary republican can give this text an honest reading without coming to the conclusion that the Roosevelt administration, rather than being a reluctant entrant into the war, was an enthusiastic and very active provocateur.
If the propositions of this text were not true, no WWII archives would still be secret.

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Pearl Harbor: The Day of Infamy-An Illustrated History Review

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(More customer reviews)December 7, 1941 is one of the most famous days in American History. For me most of what I know about has either come from books or movies. I did visit the Arizona Memorial when I was in the Navy and nothing compares to the feeling you get when you are there.
This book is more that a history with pictures, it tells small stories about the men and women who were there and what they went through. It shows photographs of the battles, the ships, the men the Americans and the Japanese, simply put it was a great reading.
There are over 200 pictures and some of them have never been seen before this book. Also there are paintings and the stories are told in the first person to give you the feeling of actually being there.
While the event is 60 years old the memories last a lifetime and this book will make a great addition to my personal library. Now when my kids ask about that faithful day I can open up this book and show them.

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Bankrupting the Enemy: The U.S. Financial Siege of Japan Before Pearl Harbor Review

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(More customer reviews)Not much to say except that this book is a must read for everyone who is interested in the origins of the Pacific War or World War II.

Author Miller does an excellent job of depicting Japan's vulnerable economy, desperately needing foreign exchange but being dependent on silk as its mainstay in foreign trade. Japan possessed (& possesses) few natural resources and was forced to import its oil, iron ore, metal scrap, and almost all products needed to grow its economy or carry on a war.
The US played the role of spoiler, attempting to hold Japan's economic survival hostage to its international good behavior (as seen by Roosevelt), and the leaders of Japan could not allow that to continue for many reasons, not the least of which was the belief in Japan's destiny to rule the East. The activities of Acheson under Roosevelt's guidance are fascinating, and the reader is carried along as in a suspense novel leading toward a catastrophic conclusion. The author blends facts and figures with activities and policies with amazing ease.
My only criticism stems from the missing links to external events and the fears and attitudes of others. For example, the freeze of July, 1941, closely followed the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany, and there is substantial evidence that Roosevelt sought open hostilities with Japan while the Russians were still in the field. By November, 1941, many in Roosevelt's administration felt that Moscow was imperiled and that the Russians could soon collapse, leaving Britain and the US to face Germany alone and the very distinct probability that Japan would then choose to honor the Tripartite Pact and enter the fray at the most opportune moment. Without going into a full discussion of Pearl Harbor, there is nonetheless much evidence that Roosevelt was aware that an attack was coming, but felt the US could weather the blows. This book records the tightening of the screws on Japan until Japan launched its attack before the Soviet Union was defeated (although, of course, it never was) because of economic reasons rather than political ones. One wonders if Roosevelt had not taken the tack he did and begun supplying the Soviet Union with critical items in the winter of 1941, would Germany have prevailed? I think not, but there is no arguing that the assistance of the US to Britain and Russia was vastly more helpful sooner than later.
At any rate, Acheson's activities are more understandable in this light, as is the ever-increasing economic and diplomatic pressure on Japan by the US up to Pearl Harbor.
So in the end, it was the economic situation that caused the Japanese to attack when they did, not the political attitudes or timing due to the other events in World War II. In effect, Roosevelt launched a spoiling attack against Japan using economics that was very effective in changing the timing of events more to the US's advantage. That is the reason this book is so important, and it is recommended to all serious students of World War II.


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Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11--How the Secret War between the FBI and CIA Has Endangered National Security Review

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(More customer reviews)This is one of those books you know people in high places should read, but of course they never will. If they actually do, they of course will be thwarted in their efforts to implement any corrections that are pointed out by the book, because the institutional forces that are involved are way too powerful, and way to attached to their perks and spheres of power to shift any, even for reasons of National Security.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation was essentially the creature, or creation anyway, of J. Edgar Hoover, who was the director of the Bureau for a record 46 years (a record not likely to ever be broken). Hoover built up the organization from an obscure office in the Department of Justice into a behemoth that ran down the "moto-bandits" of the 20's and early 30's (Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machinegun Kelly) and then helped put the East Coast mob into retreat, at least temporarily, in the mid-30's. By then he'd become powerful enough that he felt his power and authority should be expanded.
One of the directions in which he wished to extend his power was toward political dissent and disloyalty in the U.S. Hoover himself was apparently pretty apolitical, at least as far as partisan Republican vs. Democrat issues were concerned, but he was very disturbed by Communist influence, and possible Nazi influence, in the U.S., and he apparently felt that he should be in charge of rooting out the elements of these philosophies that were in the U.S.
Tied up with this was the issue of espionage. For a while, Hoover had a clear field, but when the U.S. entered World War II, his FBI, clearly a law enforcement agency trained to catch criminals, wasn't very good at catching spies. Worse, their focus was on *catching* them, as opposed to feeding them bad information, for instance, or following them to see who they led authorities to. Hoover's own mindset, stubbornly provincial and conservative, ruled out the Bureau learning how to do these things: instead, he doggedly persisted in attempts to control how enemy agents were dealt with, who actually dealt with them, and most importantly, who got the credit.
By the time the Office of Strategic Services was formed in 1942, the lines were already pretty clearly drawn. Hoover would oppose any expansion of intelligence capability outside of the Bureau itself, and doggedly continue to try and expand his power vis a vis intelligence matters. When he died 30 years later, he was still trying.
The first half of this book lays out the problems this created when the U.S. first tried to deal with the threat of the Nazis, and later with the Communists. Hoover's death didn't end the bureaucratic rivalry that had sprung up: by then the institutional memory of the CIA and FBI was too strong to be killed off by the absence of one individual. The rest of the book deals with the post-Hoover era, with the last chapter and an epilogue added on later, which outline the current difficulties in the War on Terror.
The author lays all of this out in considerable detail, and frankly at times it makes for pretty horrifying reading. All the way back in the beginning, Hoover absent-mindedly filed away the message the Nazis sent double-agent Dusko Popov asking him for ship dispositions and locations, torpedo net positions, and other very suggestive things regarding Pearl Harbor. When the attack actually occurred, Popov was in South America. The first report of the attack that he heard only gave note of it, and he was elated, figuring that with the information he had given the U.S. we must have won a terrific victory. He was later outraged to discover we didn't use the information. Hoover, apparently, didn't trust or like traitors, even those who betrayed our enemies.
There is one proviso with a book like this. *All* intelligence books written about recent history are somewhat problematic, in that the author tends to discover information about the *failures* of intelligence. Successes, if properly conducted, remain out of sight of the public. This book is probably especially prone to that, given that the subject is implicitly a failure, or series of failures, in intelligence. That being said, the author certainly had a lot of material to report, and regardless of any successes, there's enough here to make your hair stand on end. The book is somewhat dated, too: the main narrative finishes just as the first President Bush leaves office to be replaced by Bill Clinton, and the epilogue/afterward are frankly inadequate to deal with the issues facing us today. I would have much preferred it if the author had added another hundred pages, instead of the 20 or so that are tacked onto the end of this edition. He does mention constraints of space, so perhaps the publisher is to blame.
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in current affairs or the current intelligence failures in the U.S.

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Prophetic when first published, even more relevant now, Wedge is the classic, definitive story of the secret war America has waged against itself. Based on scores of interviews with former spies and thousands of declassified documents, Wedge reveals and re-creates -- battle by battle, bungle by bungle -- the epic clash that has made America uniquely vulnerable to its enemies. For more than six decades, the opposed and overlapping missions of the FBI and CIA -- and the rival personalities of cops and spies -- have caused fistfights and turf tangles, breakdowns and cover-ups, public scandals and tragic deaths. A grand panorama of dramatic episodes, peopled by picaresque secret agents from Ian Fleming to Oliver North, Wedge is both a journey and a warning. From Pearl Harbor, McCarthyism, and the plots to kill Castro through the JFK assassination, Watergate, and Iran Contra down to the Aldrich Ames affair, Robert Hanssen's treachery, and the hunt for Al Qaeda -- Wedge shows the price America has paid for its failure to resolve the conflict between law enforcement and intelligence. Gripping and authoritative -- and updated with an important new epilogue, carrying the action through to September 11, 2001 -- Wedge is the only book about the schism that has informed nearly every major blunder in American espionage.

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Day Of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor Review

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(More customer reviews)Most books about Pearl Harbor, from the many volumes of the Congressional Pearl Harbor Hearings to the two-volume study by the late Gordon Prange detail all kinds of intelligence available to the United States that forewarned of the Japanese attack. If you have some background in that history, Stinnett's well-documented book adds new material to the story and discloses a set of Japanese Navy communications intercepts that complement more publicized decoded exchanges among the Japanses diplomatic corps.
The notion that high minded government leaders might conspire to manipulate American public opinion in support of a cause they think important and worth American lives is not as evocative in the post-Vietnam politics than it would have been in 1941.
Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson both managed to entice "enemy" attacks on U.S. forces to rally American public opinion Congressional support. They aren't alone. While damage to the U.S. fleet and personnel at Pearl Harbor far exceeded the couple of bullet holes inflicted on the USS Turner Joy and Maddox in the Tonkin Gulf in 1964, the pre-event manipulation was not all that different. That people in government might conspire to keep their machinations hidden from the press and public, sadly, isn't novel either anymore. Radiation experiments, commandos known to be captured, but written off as killed and all the rest have taught us almost too much about human nature.
While Stinnett writes bitterly about the impact on lives and careers of competent officers and men caught up in concealing vital intelligence information from Hawaiian-based officers and subsequently threatened and besmirched to maintain secrecy long after the event, even now, when records are still held secret by the DOD in some bizarre interpretation of protecting the National Defense. At the same time, however, Sinnett and any person with a memory and conscience is hard put to accept the possible outcome of world events in the 1940s had the United States stayed outof the European War.
If this is your first Pearl Harbor book you may get lost in the detail and obscurity needed to substantiate the book's argument. Read something else first, but read this one too.

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Pearl Harbor Ghosts : The Legacy of December 7, 1941 Review

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(More customer reviews)This book, is, in my opinion the best book written about Pearl Harbor to date. There are several reasons behind these feelings. I have read a number of books on the subject and most are written in the tone of a PhD thesis. This book was very readable and read more like a novel than a historical work. The author wove the information together in the form of a story rather than as a dry recitation of fact. Additionally, I enjoyed the approach taken by the author. The book starts with an early history of the Islands, and then moves onto the days right before the attack using real people and their families to bring a sense of what life was like in Hawaii before the attack and why the attack so devistated so many people. Following are details of the attack, the way in which it changed people and then into the life of modern Hawaii and the lingering affects of the bombing. This was throughly enjoying and made me understand the events of December 7th in a whole new light!!

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A landmark book published to rave reviews a decade ago, Pearl Harbor Ghosts has now been updated to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the surprise attack that forever changed the course of history. Full of gripping drama and vibrant details, here is the intimate human story of the events surrounding that fateful day of December 7, 1941–the glamorous tropical city that seemed too beautiful to suffer devastation . . . the stunned naval personnel whose lives would permanently be divided into before and after Pearl Harbor . . . the ordinary Honolulu residents who were tragically unprepared to be the first target in the Pacific war . . . the Japanese pilots who manned the squadron of deadly silver bombers . . . and the island's community of Japanese-Americans whose lives would never be the same again. Blending meticulous historic recreation with lively reporting, Clarke counterpoints the freeze-frame nightmare of the 1941 bombing with the disturbing realities of present-day Honolulu, where hundreds of veterans, both American and Japanese, converge each year to relive every hour of the attack. Wealthy Waikiki landowners and native Hawaiian farmers, admirals and nurses, Navy wives and government officials–all take their part in Clarke's rich tapestry of memory and insight. In the end, Pearl Harbor emerges as a trauma that spread from Oahu to engulf the nation and the world–an event that continues to reverberate in the lives of all who experienced it.

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