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Millions of words have been written about Pearl Harbor. But this book, by
Admiral Kimmel, is the final word that sets the story in the perspective of
history. Admiral Kimmel tells us what it was like to be left holding the bag
in a most vulnerable position. It is said that he should have kept his ships
at sea. But Washington allowed him only four oil tankers — which were
not sufficient to keep more than a third of the fleet at sea at anyone time.
(When the Japanese struck, he had the most valuable third — the aircraft
carriers — outside of Pearl Harbor, on the open ocean.) He also lacked oil
storage tanks at the Pearl Harbor base; the promised new facilities were not
completed until after war began. The planes he needed to maintain a 360
degree patrol of the approaches to Hawaii, though promised to him again and
again, were never delivered to him. As for his war warnings, they were all
to the effect that the Japanese contemplated an attack on the Malay
peninsula and the East Indies. Finally, he was denied all knowledge of the
"magic" that was available in Washington because of the fact that we had
broken the Japanese code. Japanese messages which were intercepted and
decoded in Washington gave the High Command plenty of warning that the war
was coming on December 7th at one P.M. Eastern Standard Time. But neither
the Navy nor the Army in Hawaii got a word about the substance of the
Japanese messages until after the attack had come. Admiral Kimmel sticks to
his own end of the story. He tells us about the material he was denied, the
warning messages he didn't get. He impugns no motives, he makes no
deductions from unproved hypotheses. But the book is sufficient to nail down
the inescapable point: the blame for the loss of the Pacific fleet
battleships rests squarely on Washington, not on the men at Pearl.
Near dusk on a Sunday afternoon in mid-January, 1941,
Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel was advised he was to become Commander-Chief
of the Pacific Fleet about February 1. Behind this assignment were forty yea
rs of distinguished naval service, following his graduation from Annapolis
in 1904. As a junior officer he served as a turret and gunnery officer of
battleship and cruiser, a squadron and fleet gunnery officer, and production
officer of the U. S. naval gun factory in Washington, D.C. He had served as
aide to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, and helped
develop an important system for the analysis of gunnery scores. He has seen
service in all parts of the world, serving at various times as executive
officer, commander of a destroyer squadron, commander of a battleship, and a
heavy cruiser division. He served as chief-of-staff to the commander
battleships of the battle force, and his shore duty included work with the
Naval War College and other branches of Navy operations in Washington.
One year following his appointment as
Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet he was relieved from duty. Retired
with the rank of Rear Admiral, never formally charged with dereliction of
duty or errors of judgment, he spent the ensuing decade in a struggle to
discover and to preserve the facts. |