Book Review: Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath, by John Toland
A critical investigation into Pearl Harbor and its aftermath
Doubleday & Co., 1982, 397 pages
A revealing and controversial account of the events surrounding Pearl Harbor.
Pulitzer Prize - winning author John Toland presents evidence that FDR and his top advisors knew about the planned Japanese attack but remained silent.
Infamy reveals the conspiracy to cover up the facts and find scapegoats for the greatest disaster in United States military history. New York Times best-seller.
"Yesterday, December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan."
There are dozens of books titled Infamy, most of them about Pearl Harbor. December 7, 1941 remains one of the most famous dates in American history, bigger than anything but 9/11 until 9/11.
I read this book because I had previously read John Toland's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945. Toland is a thorough, meticulous historian, and while some of the material in Infamy repeats things he wrote in Rising Sun, this is not just a collection of excerpts. He did independent research in tracking down the truth behind Pearl Harbor, including interviewing American and Japanese officials (many of whom were still alive when he wrote this in 1982), talking families into giving him old papers and letters, and sending FOIA requests to the NSA and the Department of the Navy. (Some material about WWII was still classified into the 1980s.)
Infamy is not about the Pearl Harbor attack itself (Toland describes it very briefly), but about what led up to it, and the aftermath.
The Blame Game
There are many obvious parallels between Pearl Harbor and 9/11. In both cases, the American public was stunned by a shocking, unprovoked attack on American soil, experienced a brief moment of national unity, and then fell to blaming and recriminations. In both cases, there were, in hindsight, many steps that led to the attack, many warnings ignored, and many balls dropped that could have prevented it. And in both cases, there are conspiracy theories that persist to this day accusing people in high places - all the way up to the president himself - of being complicit.
Toland makes a convincing case that there was plenty of blame to go around and that most of it didn't fall on the right people.
Kimmel stood by the window of his office at the submarine base, his jaw set in stony anguish. As he watched the disaster across the harbor unfold with terrible fury, a spent .50 caliber machine gun bullet crashed through the glass. It brushed the admiral before it clanged to the floor. It cut his white jacket and raised a welt on his chest. "It would have been merciful had it killed me," Kimmel murmured to his communications officer, Commander Maurice "Germany" Curts.
Admiral Husband Kimmel was in command of Pearl Harbor on the day of the attack. He watched the bombs falling and knew his career was over even before the fires were put out. Toland writes a poignant account of Kimmel walking into his office, taking the four stars of his temporary rank off his shoulders, and replacing them with his previous "official" rank of two stars, bringing a young serviceman almost to tears.
Kimmel knew he'd shoulder responsibility for the Pearl Harbor attack. It didn't matter whether he was really to blame: in the Navy, if something goes wrong under your watch, it's your fault. That's just the way it is. But in the aftermath, the cries for heads grew louder, and it soon became apparent that those heads would be Admiral Kimmel and General Short, the US Army commander at Pearl Harbor. Kimmel was willing to accept responsibility for his failure, but he wasn't willing to accept charges of dereliction, ineptitude, and negligence. He received death threats. People wrote letters to newspapers asking why he hadn't been court martialed and stripped of his pension. Some wanted him hung, others asked why he didn't do the "honorable" thing and shoot himself. His sons, also naval officers, caught some of the flack. As Kimmel saw himself made a scapegoat, with the threat of formal charges being held over his head, he began to fight back, starting by demanding a formal court martial. The Navy didn't actually want a court martial, because that would allow him to ask embarrassing questions on the public record, but they also didn't want to say they weren't going to court martial him, because that would outrage the public.
Kimmel was shuffled off to a desk job until he retired the following year, but he spent the rest of his life trying to clear his name.
The Knox Report
"I think the most effective Fifth Column work of the entire war was done in Hawaii with the exception of Norway."
The first official report on the Pearl Harbor attack was compiled by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, who went to Hawaii to conduct an investigation personally. Knox, who had been agitating to round up all Japanese immigrants even before Pearl Harbor, not only blamed the military for being unprepared, but claimed that local Japanese fifth columnists had aided the attack. Though these accusations were never substantiated, the Knox report was a bombshell that did much to shape public opinion. Knox spent the rest of the war trying to get all the Japanese in Hawaii interned. (Most Japanese on the mainland were sent to internment camps, but few in Hawaii were, for political and economic reasons.)
The Roberts Commission
The Roberts Commission was the first of nearly a dozen investigations into Pearl Harbor in the years that followed. Headed by US Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, it found Admiral Kimmel and General Short guilty of "dereliction of duty" by failing to prepare adequately for a Japanese attack. The Knox Report and the Roberts Commission absolutely threw Kimmel and Short under the bus, and following the Roberts Commission, Kimmel became one of the most hated men in America. Even as he was trying to defend his reputation, he received word that his son, Manning Kimmel, had gone down in a submarine off of Palawan.
Notably, the Robert Commission report hid the fact that Washington had received credible information from a number of sources that a Japanese attack was imminent; information that was withheld from the commanders in Hawaii.
Toland comes down on the side of most historians, who in retrospect do not consider Kimmel and Short singularly responsible for their ill-preparedness. It's true that by December of 1941, everyone believed war with Japan was inevitable, and the US had contemplated the possibility of a Japanese attack on Hawaii as early as the 1930s. Toland also cites several high-ranking US officers who had previously written about Japan's penchant for "sudden, devastating surprise attacks." So an attack on Pearl Harbor wasn't actually unthinkable, though most military experts considered it such a long shot, with severe logistic and strategic challenges, that Japan would be foolish to attempt it.
They weren't wrong. But they weren't counting on Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, a military genius, a Japanese naval officer who'd spent time in the US, and an inveterate gambler.
Possibly no one else could have pulled off the Pearl Harbor attack. Yamamoto caught the Americans fully unprepared.
Did they know?
The question "Did anyone actually know Pearl Harbor was going to happen before it happened?" is a complicated one, and here is where Toland's book shines, as he goes into great detail about individual people and events. In some cases, Toland personally tracked them down for interviews, or delved into archived State Department and Navy records.
He makes a compelling argument that there were many people who knew the Japanese were about to attack, and that they would probably strike at Pearl Harbor. The Pearl Harbor plan was obviously a "secret," but it was a rather open one in Japanese military circles; you can't send a carrier fleet across the Pacific to start a war without word getting around. So there are accounts of Dutch diplomats passing on information overheard to American consular officials, a Korean-American agent who had definite intelligence on the Kidō Butai fleet and sent it on, confident that he had warned America in time to give the Japanese a "hot reception." There were intercepted diplomatic communications that set off alarm bells for the translators and decoders, but which somehow didn't make their way to the desks of the President or the Secretary of the Navy until too late. There are even credible accounts of military personnel from Alaska to Hawaii picking up radio signals that, with hindsight, should have told them what was afoot. Weeks earlier, there was a message to the Japanese consulate in Honolulu asking the officials there to map out Pearl Harbor and its ships on a grid for the obvious purpose of bombing, a message that was decrypted and passed on to the Navy but not forwarded to Kimmel and Short.
The story Toland assembles is a convincing one: there was plenty of information available that, had anyone put it together, made it obvious what was about to happen. Of course hindsight is 20/20 and some things are obvious only after the fact, but clearly mistakes were made.
So, the commanders in Hawaii knew that the Japanese might attack "soon," but they hadn't been given concrete information about an imminent attack. In fact, some of that information had been purposefully withheld from them. Admiral Kimmel was not the only one who was outraged, after the war, to find out that intelligence had not been passed on to him that would certainly have altered his readiness posture.
Why wasn't he given all the information? Part of it was a cover-up that persisted until well into the war: the Japanese code used to encrypt diplomatic communications had been broken, but the US obviously didn't want the Japanese to know their code had been broken. But some of the messages weren't passed on because of skepticism, because of petty rivalries and bureaucratic fiefdoms, and intelligence officers believing they knew better than to panic over speculation.
This comes up a lot in Toland's book: the Washington bureaucracy hid things, there was infighting between Naval offices and between the Army and the Navy, and intelligence was treated as a prize to be jealously held onto, not shared freely, when someone else might get credit for it.
Toland does not, however, give any credibility to the theory that FDR himself knew about the imminent attack on Pearl Harbor, and deliberately failed to warn the commanders there because he wanted the US to enter the war.
Prelude to War
In the last part of the book, Toland turns from the multiple reports and commissions that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor to the history that led up to it. This is ground he covered more thoroughly in Rising Sun, but in short: Japan was in a tough spot. They wanted to be a first-class power, but Japan had few natural resources, so realistically, they could only join the other great powers by engaging in colonialism like everyone else had. Unfortunately for them, Europe and America didn't want to see the rise of Japan as a rival. This was for a variety of reasons, of which racism was certainly one, but Japan's invasion of China had been met with severe disapprobation, and the US was threatening to cut off their oil. This would strangle the Japanese economy and all their imperial ambitions. The choice they were given was essentially: give up on being a world power, or go to war.
Toland talks a lot about the diplomatic maneuvers in the years and then the weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack. It's another tale of unfortunate mistakes and misunderstandings. Secretary of State Henry Stimson was a Japanophobe who was outright hostile to them; he took a hard line in situations where a softer approach might have left more room for negotiations. On the other hand, the Japanese had their own internal problems that often prevented them from giving a straightforward answer to American proposals. Worse, sometimes their responses were translated badly, in a way that gave the impression they were being duplicitous when they weren't. In Toland's interviews, long after the war, he reveals some of the details of these messages and how they were received to some of the parties involved, and more than once, was told, "If we had known that was what they actually meant, it would have changed things..."
Although Japan later committed itself fully to war, right up until war was declared, all but the most fanatical militarists were trying to find a way out of war because they knew, as Admiral Yamamoto did, that Japan couldn't win. The night before the attack, the Japanese envoys in Washington were still trying to negotiate a peace plan that could somehow satisfy both sides, unaware that the Kidō Butai fleet was on its way.
I've read a lot of books about World War II now, and John Toland stands out for his research and his detail. Infamy isn't a completely objective recitation of historical facts; Toland is opinionated at times, though moderate in how he expresses it. But he did a lot of research and legwork, and he clearly believes that the Washington bureaucracy was more to blame for the Pearl Harbor attack than the unfortunate commanders in charge. FDR himself comes off as being somewhat mendacious and scheming, as he really did want America to join the war against Germany, which before Pearl Harbor was not something he could sell to the American people. So did he want, even expect, that Japan would give him the excuse he needed? Possibly. But Toland's description of his reaction in the aftermath is not of a man who had prior information. It was more that of a man who had received bad news he'd been dreading.
Some other ignoble episodes in the book include the Census Department being put to work literally the night of December 7 assembling a list of every single Japanese name in North America and Hawaii; a task that census officials later denied they had ever worked on. There was also the shoddy treatment of men like Commander Laurance Safford and Captain Joseph Rochefort, Naval cryptographers who embarrassed their superiors by being right and had their careers derailed because of it.
If you are interested in WWII history, not from the perspective of battles and campaigns, but the politics and causes, I would really recommend Toland's magnum opus, Rising Sun, but Infamy is an excellent investigation into how it started.
Also by John Toland: My review of The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945.
My complete list of book reviews.
Doubleday & Co., 1982, 397 pages
A revealing and controversial account of the events surrounding Pearl Harbor.
Pulitzer Prize - winning author John Toland presents evidence that FDR and his top advisors knew about the planned Japanese attack but remained silent.
Infamy reveals the conspiracy to cover up the facts and find scapegoats for the greatest disaster in United States military history. New York Times best-seller.
"Yesterday, December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan."
There are dozens of books titled Infamy, most of them about Pearl Harbor. December 7, 1941 remains one of the most famous dates in American history, bigger than anything but 9/11 until 9/11.
I read this book because I had previously read John Toland's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945. Toland is a thorough, meticulous historian, and while some of the material in Infamy repeats things he wrote in Rising Sun, this is not just a collection of excerpts. He did independent research in tracking down the truth behind Pearl Harbor, including interviewing American and Japanese officials (many of whom were still alive when he wrote this in 1982), talking families into giving him old papers and letters, and sending FOIA requests to the NSA and the Department of the Navy. (Some material about WWII was still classified into the 1980s.)
Infamy is not about the Pearl Harbor attack itself (Toland describes it very briefly), but about what led up to it, and the aftermath.
The Blame Game
There are many obvious parallels between Pearl Harbor and 9/11. In both cases, the American public was stunned by a shocking, unprovoked attack on American soil, experienced a brief moment of national unity, and then fell to blaming and recriminations. In both cases, there were, in hindsight, many steps that led to the attack, many warnings ignored, and many balls dropped that could have prevented it. And in both cases, there are conspiracy theories that persist to this day accusing people in high places - all the way up to the president himself - of being complicit.
Toland makes a convincing case that there was plenty of blame to go around and that most of it didn't fall on the right people.
Kimmel stood by the window of his office at the submarine base, his jaw set in stony anguish. As he watched the disaster across the harbor unfold with terrible fury, a spent .50 caliber machine gun bullet crashed through the glass. It brushed the admiral before it clanged to the floor. It cut his white jacket and raised a welt on his chest. "It would have been merciful had it killed me," Kimmel murmured to his communications officer, Commander Maurice "Germany" Curts.
Admiral Husband Kimmel was in command of Pearl Harbor on the day of the attack. He watched the bombs falling and knew his career was over even before the fires were put out. Toland writes a poignant account of Kimmel walking into his office, taking the four stars of his temporary rank off his shoulders, and replacing them with his previous "official" rank of two stars, bringing a young serviceman almost to tears.
Kimmel knew he'd shoulder responsibility for the Pearl Harbor attack. It didn't matter whether he was really to blame: in the Navy, if something goes wrong under your watch, it's your fault. That's just the way it is. But in the aftermath, the cries for heads grew louder, and it soon became apparent that those heads would be Admiral Kimmel and General Short, the US Army commander at Pearl Harbor. Kimmel was willing to accept responsibility for his failure, but he wasn't willing to accept charges of dereliction, ineptitude, and negligence. He received death threats. People wrote letters to newspapers asking why he hadn't been court martialed and stripped of his pension. Some wanted him hung, others asked why he didn't do the "honorable" thing and shoot himself. His sons, also naval officers, caught some of the flack. As Kimmel saw himself made a scapegoat, with the threat of formal charges being held over his head, he began to fight back, starting by demanding a formal court martial. The Navy didn't actually want a court martial, because that would allow him to ask embarrassing questions on the public record, but they also didn't want to say they weren't going to court martial him, because that would outrage the public.
Kimmel was shuffled off to a desk job until he retired the following year, but he spent the rest of his life trying to clear his name.
The Knox Report
"I think the most effective Fifth Column work of the entire war was done in Hawaii with the exception of Norway."
The first official report on the Pearl Harbor attack was compiled by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, who went to Hawaii to conduct an investigation personally. Knox, who had been agitating to round up all Japanese immigrants even before Pearl Harbor, not only blamed the military for being unprepared, but claimed that local Japanese fifth columnists had aided the attack. Though these accusations were never substantiated, the Knox report was a bombshell that did much to shape public opinion. Knox spent the rest of the war trying to get all the Japanese in Hawaii interned. (Most Japanese on the mainland were sent to internment camps, but few in Hawaii were, for political and economic reasons.)
The Roberts Commission
The Roberts Commission was the first of nearly a dozen investigations into Pearl Harbor in the years that followed. Headed by US Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, it found Admiral Kimmel and General Short guilty of "dereliction of duty" by failing to prepare adequately for a Japanese attack. The Knox Report and the Roberts Commission absolutely threw Kimmel and Short under the bus, and following the Roberts Commission, Kimmel became one of the most hated men in America. Even as he was trying to defend his reputation, he received word that his son, Manning Kimmel, had gone down in a submarine off of Palawan.
Notably, the Robert Commission report hid the fact that Washington had received credible information from a number of sources that a Japanese attack was imminent; information that was withheld from the commanders in Hawaii.
Toland comes down on the side of most historians, who in retrospect do not consider Kimmel and Short singularly responsible for their ill-preparedness. It's true that by December of 1941, everyone believed war with Japan was inevitable, and the US had contemplated the possibility of a Japanese attack on Hawaii as early as the 1930s. Toland also cites several high-ranking US officers who had previously written about Japan's penchant for "sudden, devastating surprise attacks." So an attack on Pearl Harbor wasn't actually unthinkable, though most military experts considered it such a long shot, with severe logistic and strategic challenges, that Japan would be foolish to attempt it.
They weren't wrong. But they weren't counting on Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, a military genius, a Japanese naval officer who'd spent time in the US, and an inveterate gambler.
Possibly no one else could have pulled off the Pearl Harbor attack. Yamamoto caught the Americans fully unprepared.
Did they know?
The question "Did anyone actually know Pearl Harbor was going to happen before it happened?" is a complicated one, and here is where Toland's book shines, as he goes into great detail about individual people and events. In some cases, Toland personally tracked them down for interviews, or delved into archived State Department and Navy records.
He makes a compelling argument that there were many people who knew the Japanese were about to attack, and that they would probably strike at Pearl Harbor. The Pearl Harbor plan was obviously a "secret," but it was a rather open one in Japanese military circles; you can't send a carrier fleet across the Pacific to start a war without word getting around. So there are accounts of Dutch diplomats passing on information overheard to American consular officials, a Korean-American agent who had definite intelligence on the Kidō Butai fleet and sent it on, confident that he had warned America in time to give the Japanese a "hot reception." There were intercepted diplomatic communications that set off alarm bells for the translators and decoders, but which somehow didn't make their way to the desks of the President or the Secretary of the Navy until too late. There are even credible accounts of military personnel from Alaska to Hawaii picking up radio signals that, with hindsight, should have told them what was afoot. Weeks earlier, there was a message to the Japanese consulate in Honolulu asking the officials there to map out Pearl Harbor and its ships on a grid for the obvious purpose of bombing, a message that was decrypted and passed on to the Navy but not forwarded to Kimmel and Short.
The story Toland assembles is a convincing one: there was plenty of information available that, had anyone put it together, made it obvious what was about to happen. Of course hindsight is 20/20 and some things are obvious only after the fact, but clearly mistakes were made.
So, the commanders in Hawaii knew that the Japanese might attack "soon," but they hadn't been given concrete information about an imminent attack. In fact, some of that information had been purposefully withheld from them. Admiral Kimmel was not the only one who was outraged, after the war, to find out that intelligence had not been passed on to him that would certainly have altered his readiness posture.
Why wasn't he given all the information? Part of it was a cover-up that persisted until well into the war: the Japanese code used to encrypt diplomatic communications had been broken, but the US obviously didn't want the Japanese to know their code had been broken. But some of the messages weren't passed on because of skepticism, because of petty rivalries and bureaucratic fiefdoms, and intelligence officers believing they knew better than to panic over speculation.
This comes up a lot in Toland's book: the Washington bureaucracy hid things, there was infighting between Naval offices and between the Army and the Navy, and intelligence was treated as a prize to be jealously held onto, not shared freely, when someone else might get credit for it.
Toland does not, however, give any credibility to the theory that FDR himself knew about the imminent attack on Pearl Harbor, and deliberately failed to warn the commanders there because he wanted the US to enter the war.
Prelude to War
In the last part of the book, Toland turns from the multiple reports and commissions that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor to the history that led up to it. This is ground he covered more thoroughly in Rising Sun, but in short: Japan was in a tough spot. They wanted to be a first-class power, but Japan had few natural resources, so realistically, they could only join the other great powers by engaging in colonialism like everyone else had. Unfortunately for them, Europe and America didn't want to see the rise of Japan as a rival. This was for a variety of reasons, of which racism was certainly one, but Japan's invasion of China had been met with severe disapprobation, and the US was threatening to cut off their oil. This would strangle the Japanese economy and all their imperial ambitions. The choice they were given was essentially: give up on being a world power, or go to war.
Toland talks a lot about the diplomatic maneuvers in the years and then the weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack. It's another tale of unfortunate mistakes and misunderstandings. Secretary of State Henry Stimson was a Japanophobe who was outright hostile to them; he took a hard line in situations where a softer approach might have left more room for negotiations. On the other hand, the Japanese had their own internal problems that often prevented them from giving a straightforward answer to American proposals. Worse, sometimes their responses were translated badly, in a way that gave the impression they were being duplicitous when they weren't. In Toland's interviews, long after the war, he reveals some of the details of these messages and how they were received to some of the parties involved, and more than once, was told, "If we had known that was what they actually meant, it would have changed things..."
Although Japan later committed itself fully to war, right up until war was declared, all but the most fanatical militarists were trying to find a way out of war because they knew, as Admiral Yamamoto did, that Japan couldn't win. The night before the attack, the Japanese envoys in Washington were still trying to negotiate a peace plan that could somehow satisfy both sides, unaware that the Kidō Butai fleet was on its way.
I've read a lot of books about World War II now, and John Toland stands out for his research and his detail. Infamy isn't a completely objective recitation of historical facts; Toland is opinionated at times, though moderate in how he expresses it. But he did a lot of research and legwork, and he clearly believes that the Washington bureaucracy was more to blame for the Pearl Harbor attack than the unfortunate commanders in charge. FDR himself comes off as being somewhat mendacious and scheming, as he really did want America to join the war against Germany, which before Pearl Harbor was not something he could sell to the American people. So did he want, even expect, that Japan would give him the excuse he needed? Possibly. But Toland's description of his reaction in the aftermath is not of a man who had prior information. It was more that of a man who had received bad news he'd been dreading.
Some other ignoble episodes in the book include the Census Department being put to work literally the night of December 7 assembling a list of every single Japanese name in North America and Hawaii; a task that census officials later denied they had ever worked on. There was also the shoddy treatment of men like Commander Laurance Safford and Captain Joseph Rochefort, Naval cryptographers who embarrassed their superiors by being right and had their careers derailed because of it.
If you are interested in WWII history, not from the perspective of battles and campaigns, but the politics and causes, I would really recommend Toland's magnum opus, Rising Sun, but Infamy is an excellent investigation into how it started.
Also by John Toland: My review of The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945.
My complete list of book reviews.