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New releases from Hawaii authors, reviewed by Burl Burlingame:
"Deceit at Pearl Harbor -- From Pearl Harbor to Midway" by Lt. Cmdr. Kenneth Landis and Staff Sgt. Rex Gunn (1st Books, $18)Yet another book about Pearl Harbor that lays the blame not on Imperial Japan but on presumed perfidy by Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party -- but there's a difference here. This one is written by several Pearl Harbor survivors, one of whom was on Adm. Kimmel's staff during the attack. Like other books of this type, the government does not agree and you won't find it being sold on the shelves at the USS Arizona Visitor Center.
Many Pearl Harbor veterans believe there was high-level butt-covering in 1941, and this book repeats many of the traditional "revisionist" theories. The most damming piece of evidence is fairly new - a decoded German intelligence document reporting on a scrambled telephone conversation between Winston Churchill and Roosevelt in late November, 1941, in which Winston flatly tells Franklin the "nips" are going to strike on Dec. 8 at Pearl Harbor. Neither, apparently, realized the Imperial Navy was steaming on Tokyo time. If this document can be proved authentic, then it certainly shakes things up, and it was first revealed in an American intelligence journal in 1997. As a book, "Deceit at Pearl Harbor" could have used an editor. It appears to have been assembled piece-meal and includes some obvious padding. As a totem of Pearl Harbor orthodoxy, however, it triggers an interesting debate.
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