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A Matter of Honor

Pearl Harbor : Betrayal, Blame, and a Family's Quest for Justice
Feb 08, 2017expfcchuck rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
Having been a WWII history junkie ever since discovering Samuel Eliot Morrison's fifteen or whatever volume official history of the US Navy in that war in my high school library 60+ years ago, Summers' and Swan's book provides solid evidence and plausible hypotheses connecting the dots in a way that explains why the Pacific Fleet command was so badly blind-sided on December 7, 1941. Admiral Kimmel truly was in the dark about the imminence of the threat to Hawaii, even though there was plenty of intelligence information available in Washington from which the dots could have been connected, and which to some extent had been. Why Kimmel and and his staff weren't sufficiently informed was due in considerable measure to bureaucratic friction and the imperative to maintain the secrecy of the MAGIC intercepts, but late in the book the authors hint there may have been more to it than that, something darker. But we'll almost certainly never know since it's unlikely any written record was kept. And yes, Admiral Kimmel definitely got screwed by being set up as the fall guy by the Roberts Commission's joke of an investigation. It may have been a war-time necessity, however, in order to protect the vital secret of MAGIC. Not to mention convenient for those in the War and Navy Departments in Washington, as well as the FBI, whose lassitude, marginal competence and in a few cases deeply flawed characters contributed to the clusterf**k. I strongly recommend this book to anyone still interested in the history of that war.