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Back to Pearl Harbor
| Article
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11603 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1986 |
3,756 Words |
| Author
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Alan J. Levine
Alan J. Levine is a historian specializing in twentieth-
century international relations and the author of From the
Normandy Beaches to the Baltic Sea. |
AND I WAS THERE
Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton
New York: William Morrow, 1985
596 pp., $19.95
In 1947, the great historian and biographer Douglas Southall Freeman reflected on the probable nature of the expected stream of memoirs from those prominent in World War II. Judging by his own work with Civil War-era writings, he suggested that "early provisional narratives" would be especially valuable because of their freshness. By 1960, he forecast, memoirs might be more accurate but would also tend to read intentions into past actions that were not really justified. But after 1965 or 1970, glamour would begin to envelope memoirs, "Few will be valuable. Most will deceive more than they will enlighten." Happily, And I was There does not deceive more than it enlightens, nor is it enveloped by glamour. It is a useful and informative work. But it must be read with caution, for it is a mix of memoir and history not free of questionable afterthoughts, and it is very much biased toward the Navy's "central Pacific" view of the war against Japan. While that point of view is note as distorted as that of MacArthur's more extreme apologist, it is however, not the whole truth.
Rear Adm. Layton, who died in 1984, joined the Pacific Fleet as its intelligence officer in December 1940. He was in a position to see the vital effects of the radio intelligence effort in the war and the misuse of it that helped produce Pearl Harbor. Layton's chief concern, his collaborators tell us, "was that by shattering old myths illumination might be cast on the way ahead with its lurking peril of a nuclear pearl Harbor. He also wished to clear the names of Kimmel and Short.”
Whatever one thinks of some of Layton's efforts to redistribute blame for Pearl Harbor, his book is an outstanding warning and a minute analysis of "how not to do it" for intelligence specialists. It is a revelation of how bureaucratic rivalries, misdistribution of available intelligence, and misinterpretation helped to cause an avoidable disaster. It is a lesson to those responsible for intelligence matters on what can happen if the nominal leaders of an organization do not keep a tight rein on feuding subordinates and bureaucratic empire-builders get the better of those actually engaged in vital tasks. It has been known for some time that, after the battle of Midway, elements of the Navy bureaucracy were able to deprive Joseph Rochefort, the navy's leading cryptanalyst, of the recognition he deserved for helping make that victory possible.
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