rlohmann
September 24th, 2005, 03:54 PM
Stinnett, Robert B., Day of Deceit; the Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor. New York, Free Press, 2000.
I missed this one when it came out.
Stinnet, whose name doesn't ring a bell, documents--convincingly--17 years of Freedom-of-Information-Act requests for documents related to Pearl Harbor and the events preceding the attack. He was apparently the beneficiary of a decision by the Pentagon shortly after the 1995 Congressional hearings (which came up with nothing particularly interesting) to declassify a large batch of internal Army and Navy memoranda to the White House, decrypts by Naval Intelligence of Japanese message traffic, and internal Justice Department correspondence.
His thesis, documented by footnotes in quantities sufficient to make even a lawyer happy, is that FDR did indeed know what was going to happen at Pearl Harbor. In fact, he worked hard to instigate it. Stinnett documents this with photocopies of documents in addition to the footnotes.
Stinnett is not a Roosevelt basher. He documents scrupulously Roosevelt's perception of the world situation at the time: the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, the deteriorating position of Great Britain in 1940, and the influence of the isolationists. He does, however, largely between the lines, disparage Roosevelt's unassailably Machiavellian solution of baiting the Japanese with Pearl Harbor and provoking them to attack it.
In this context, it is difficult to challenge his almost incidental conclusion that Kimmel and Short were hung out to dry.
There are some annoying aspects, mostly editorial. According to the endpapers, Stinnett "served in the United States Navy under Lieutenant George Bush." That's nice, but why would anyone who had ever served in the Navy at any time assert that the "21° North Latitude Meridian leads directly west from Hawaii"? He seems also to believe that Japanese Katakana equates to Roman letters.
That's minor stuff. The book is worth reading, not only for military-history wonks, but for those who believe as an article of faith that some presidents work on finding wars to start for their own Satanic purposes.
I missed this one when it came out.
Stinnet, whose name doesn't ring a bell, documents--convincingly--17 years of Freedom-of-Information-Act requests for documents related to Pearl Harbor and the events preceding the attack. He was apparently the beneficiary of a decision by the Pentagon shortly after the 1995 Congressional hearings (which came up with nothing particularly interesting) to declassify a large batch of internal Army and Navy memoranda to the White House, decrypts by Naval Intelligence of Japanese message traffic, and internal Justice Department correspondence.
His thesis, documented by footnotes in quantities sufficient to make even a lawyer happy, is that FDR did indeed know what was going to happen at Pearl Harbor. In fact, he worked hard to instigate it. Stinnett documents this with photocopies of documents in addition to the footnotes.
Stinnett is not a Roosevelt basher. He documents scrupulously Roosevelt's perception of the world situation at the time: the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, the deteriorating position of Great Britain in 1940, and the influence of the isolationists. He does, however, largely between the lines, disparage Roosevelt's unassailably Machiavellian solution of baiting the Japanese with Pearl Harbor and provoking them to attack it.
In this context, it is difficult to challenge his almost incidental conclusion that Kimmel and Short were hung out to dry.
There are some annoying aspects, mostly editorial. According to the endpapers, Stinnett "served in the United States Navy under Lieutenant George Bush." That's nice, but why would anyone who had ever served in the Navy at any time assert that the "21° North Latitude Meridian leads directly west from Hawaii"? He seems also to believe that Japanese Katakana equates to Roman letters.
That's minor stuff. The book is worth reading, not only for military-history wonks, but for those who believe as an article of faith that some presidents work on finding wars to start for their own Satanic purposes.