Customer Reviews

Pearl Harbor: Mother of All Conspiracies

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The author has done an excellent job of explaining himself. There is so much information presented in this book that people who get bogged down in minutae may never finish the book!

I own many of the books cited by the author. His quotes are correct. His conclusions are good too! Some reviewers have become all tangled up in the Japanese Naval Codes and when were they broken. The offical documents do not mean that much to me. The reason these offical documents fail to interest me very much is because I have another book that I do not believe the author has!

Radio Magazine, May 1941. This is a little booklet type of magazine popular in the 1930's and 40's. It is geared for the radio hobbiest. Back then, radio was still new and millions of people enjoyed building their own radios from parts or even kits. This magazine was for the people to read, learn, and discuss topics of interest. In this issue is an article showing the home hobbiest how to listen to the Japanese coded transmissions at home. It teaches you how to understand the codes and it even shows you how to break the Japanese Navy Codes at home. So to me much of the arguement over when could our Navy read the Japanese Codes becomes irrelavent with the solution published in a hobby magazine seven months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Regarding the question: Did they use their radios on the way to Pearl Harbor; the answer is a resounding YES! They had to!
The Japanese Navy took a northern route just below the Alutian Islands then turned south to Pearl Harbor. During the third week of November this large convoy was hit by a severe winter storm. These big storms are common in the northern Pacific this time of year.
The Japanese convoy was scattered over a huge area of the Pacific Ocean. The commanders had to use radio to form up their convoy again. When ships are thiry and sixty miles away it is not possible to signal them by semephore (signal flags). Radio was the way it had to be done. And yes indeed our West Coast radio amatuers were listneing closely as the Japanese convoy found one ship after another. It was quite time consuming and once the ships gathered around they had to sail into a protective formation taking even more time.
Station CAST knew this convoy was coming when small groups began meeting outside several Navy bases and then sailed at random up to the very northern Japanese Islands. Then the time came to sail east. Station CAST was in Corrigador Island. This is why the men and files were smuggled out by PT boat and submarine. These men knew too much to let them be prisoners.
As you read more about Pearl Harbor you will also want Stinnets book: Day of Deciet. These two books go hand in hand and both are available at Amazon.
Whatever you do read! Let it be a passion in you. Learn and love to learn. Never stop regardless of your age. Some of the Pearl Harbor books are written with a liberal slant. It is too bad because I like a book without a political slant. There are enough politics involved when author Stinnet tries and tries to get informatiom through the Freedom of Information Act. An American law to keep govt records open. The unexpected part of this FOIA is to de-classify SECRET documents.
Some authors such a Stinnet have done very well with this, Willey has not done as well. However, Willey has done very well in planting the reading and learning seed in others. Willey helps the student of history learn what it means to be hungry for information. Be sure to Read Willey's book along with Stinnets book. You will have fun for sure! George Morgenstern write an excellent book and never forget Crocker's book : Roosevelt's Red Road to Russia. There are about eight or ten books to read that will shatter your thoughts of how it was. Now you graduate into a small group who know. Harry Elmer Barnes wrote several books and edited one named after a phrase he (Beard) coined himself. Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. This is a group of eight authors driven to tell the truth just like Stinnett and Morgenstern did. A chapter in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace deals with George Orwells 1984. This is the real back story for the book or movie. If you read this then the rest you read will fall into place. No more confusion taking place. As you read more you learn that the conspiracy is put forth by our govt, and the anti-dote is given by folks like Wiley who are quiet, sincere information sources. When thinking of Pearl Harbor it is fair to ask yourself ........... why in the world are any Pearl Harbor papers still marked secret after 67 years? Read! Read more! Have fun and fill your mind with thoughts! Travel to far away countries in your mind. Have fun and never leave your couch!!!

This book is Willey's ne plus ultra - he was clearly driven to write it and to self-publish it. While it adds much to the extant Pearl Harbor historiography; it is not recommended to the uninitiated, however. For example, those who do not know that the United States was a declared neutral country prior to Pearl Harbor and what that means will miss some of Willey's conclusions. Clearly much more editing is needed as Willey's writing is, in far too many places, severely and sadly disjointed.

But, even given the above, his text anent the Japanese Naval Operations Code (Chapter Two) and the highlighting "pre-Pearl Harbor Japanese Naval Despatches" found in SRH-406 (Appendix A) indicate just how unsettled Pearl Harbor remains even today. This is worthy of the reader's attention, with the recognition that many Pearl Harbor materials remain classified even after decades of FOIA requests.

In Chapter Two, for instance, Willey makes the connection is to British Navy Cypher No. 3 which troubles the NSA even now as the continued censorship of Safford's SRH-149 shows; further, the notes on page 168 point to the many inconsistencies about "codebook" values and their "source." In Appendix A is shown the basic and elementary linguistic forsenic analysis as to when Japanese Naval message translations actually occurred - that is, those SRNs cited were translated in 1941 via Willey.

Also found in Willey is an overview of the well-known (See Kahn's The Codebreakers) attack on codes such as JN-25B, where a detailed example is used. Explained also are the numerous "less than secure" aspects of the code itself (e.g., divisible by three), Japanese code clerks exercising a lack of proper procedures, for example, "tailing." Willey notes that the JN25B code had precisely 16,409 values; far fewer than the often quoted 33,333 or 50,000, implying a much more complicated code. Bring a pad and pencil to "follow" his examples. JN25B really was a very simple code to break.

For those untutored in the many esoteric threads of the Pearl Harbor saga - nescient, naive, and gullible absolutes remain evident. Consider Budiansky's "none" as compared with "some" from Gish and Parker (each senior NSA historians). These amply display the many gaps in the fundamental knowledge regarding Pearl Harbor.

Obviously the next Pearl Harbor chukker is still to come.

"Wllley's book is nothing if not exhaustive. He includes several hundred decrypted Japanese pre-Pearl Harbor military messages, examples from the main Japanese codebook, incriminating U.S. Navy and diplomatic memos leading up to December 7, and more in eight appendices, an extensive bibliography and 30 pages of footnotes."
Dubuque Telegraph Herald, December 9, 2001

The definitive work for those interested in the incriminating details; from the most scrupulous analysis yet of pre PH decrypted traffic, to the part which the U.S. intelligence located in the Philippines played in insuring that the Dec. 7 attack was successful for Japan; from the culpability of FDR and some two dozen of his closest advisors in keeping the information of the closing Japanese fleet from the Pearl Harbor command to the cover ups in the post war investigations. This should prove to be t h e reference book for PH scholars.

Of all the books I've read about Pearl Harbor, this is the best!
The author seems to know a great deal about codebreaking and, if
anybody can nail the betrayal, Willey has done it!

This book is a mess of every conspiracy under the sun. It was proven false by Budiansky and MANY others. THE KEY documents that CONSPIRACY theorists (like Willey) told us the government was keeping SECRET were DECLASSIFIED in 1998 and 1999 and are at the National Archives at College Park. They state that as of December 1, 1941, only 10 percent of the code groups and 5 percent of the additive groups had been recovered in AN-1 (aka JN-25B). Also a report by OP-20-G on decrypts produced in various Japanese code systems for each month of 1941 reports the number of decrypts in JN-25 as "none" Futhermore a complete internal history of the solution of JN-25, was written at the end of WWII. This document, which provides great cryptologic detail,explains how JN-25 was broken during each period. It fully confirms the testimony of the USN personnel involved. By the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, no JN-25 message had been read for intelligence value.
I'd also like to say that ALL of the Japanese officers involved including, Abe, Chigusa, Fuchida, Fujita, Genda, Goto, Ishiguro, Kusaka, Maki, Matsumoto and Yoshioka all maintain radio silence was strictly observed. Fuses were removed from the transmitters and the transmitter keys were disabled. Read ("The Pearl Harbor Papers") It was NOT possible! Willey, it seems will not engage in defending his work. More that likely he knows that it is outdated.

Its a shame this book fails in its promise to expose a conspiracy but it makes for some good fiction. The author seems to feel that FDR was a communist and the reason he allowed Pearl Harbor to be attacked is to spread communisim around the world.

I was left confused and bewilderd by Mr. Willey's arguments as most of the evidence presented was taken out of order or mixed and matched to fit his argument.

Mark's book simply fuels the fantasy world of conspiracy "fans". He routinely takes quotes out of context, ignores inconvenient facts and distorts information to promote his own program, that of hate for FDR. Compare this book with Gordon Prange's works. It's easy to tell which person did the work and gives a rational view of the events surrounding this sad day in US history. If you want to see where Wiley has distorted the original information, check out www.ibiblio.org/pha, where thousands of pages of text await the person who doesn't want to be lead by the nose.