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Scapegoats: A Defense of Kimmel and Short at Pearl Harbor

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As an analyst and historian of the Pearl Harbor attack, Ned Beach brings to the table qualifications few others can match: a career as a highly-decorated Navy commander and combat veteran. That makes this look at America's on-scene military leaders on the Day of Infamy particularly insightful, and Captain Beach's opinions particularly worthy of respect.

Almost from the moment the bombs stopped falling, the rush was on to hold someone responsible for the catastrophe. Anxious to draw attention away from errors (or, according to some, deliberate policy decisions) by senior officials in Washington, D.C., government investigators and their defenders fingered Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and General Walter Short, the commanders in Hawaii, as the men to blame.

Beach sees this as accusation as a slur on the memories of two competent and dedicated officers. Kimmel and Short, Beach argues, did the best they could with the incomplete information and insufficient tools they were given. Beach does not subscribe to the 'Roosevelt knew' school of thought, though he does argue that Roosevelt's policies regarding Japan made war inevitable. Beach's main criticisms are directed at America's military and diplomatic intelligence services, short-sighted budget priorities, and political pressure to 'make someone pay' for what happened.

Very useful in its own right is Beach's concluding 'References' section, in which he shares his thoughts on nearly three dozen books, articles, and government reports on the Pearl Harbor attack. Toland, Prange, Clausen, George Morgenstern, and other key pillars of Pearl Harbor historiography are all covered in this chapter.

Author of the classic navy story 'Run Silent, Run Deep,' Captain Beach is a skilled writer as well as a keen observer, and the prose in this relatively short book never lags. 'Scapegoats' helped start the movement, still ongoing in Congress and elsewhere, to rehabilitate Kimmel's and Short's reputations, and clear their names of six decades of tarnish and shame. Beach ably makes a strong case for righting this wrong as soon as possible.

CAPT Beach's book is extremely well researched and expertly written. In just 200 pages, he provides the reader with the information available in D.C. prior to 12/7/41. He also shows how little of the information was passed to Hawaii. As to Kimmel and Short: "The glove does not fit; so...."

Ned Beach was a good naval officer and not a bad novelist, but he really lost it on this one, which is really all unhinged fantasy. If you have any interest in the facts the place to start is Kimmel, Short, and Pearl Harbor: The Final Report Revealed or (a little less clearly and objectively) Defenseless: Command Failure at Pearl Harbor.

I enjoyed reading Edward Beach materials since they are well written and well research books that tells the stories of Navy. In his books, the challenges and roles of leadership remains ever so presented and clearly described. Due to this, I was bit surprised when I read this book where the author tried to defend the roles of Admiral Kimmel and General Short, two American military commanders who were caught by surprise on 7 December 1941 at Pearl Harbor.

Unfortunately, there's really isn't anything new in this book that bears consideration. Beach reinforced and restates many aspects of Pearl Harbor events as well as many of the myths and theories that surrounds it. But what Beach cannot do and as a former naval officer, he should know this all too well is that he cannot absolve responsibilities that Kimmel and Short had on 7 December 1941. They were in command and its upon their shoulders that responsibilities and blame must fall on. It really matter not if information was withheld, or misplaced, or that they should had warnings or not. All of it proves to be pointless second guessings and Monday morning quarterbacking that actually resolves nothing. These two men were in command and if Edward Beach understand command responsiblity, then he should understand the consequences of that responsiblity.

Were these men made a scapegoats by the military and the politicans? I am sure they were but that come with a territory if your command was caught with their pants down! There are thousands of excuses in this book but they remains unimportant. Unimportant because as commanding officers, Kimmel and Short held the ultimate responsbility and accountablity for their actions or lack of actions. Any military officer from the armies of Ramses II to those fighting in Iraq knows this to be true.

The book harped a lot on the Dorn commission who reinvestigated the entire Pearl Harbor thing and there's really nothing new to say. As I read on, I am really began to think that families of Kimmel and Short were trying to do their utmost to save a reputation of these two men but by doing so, converting them into some sort of mindless drones, incapable of leadership or command without having every single information in front of them. Its my understanding that Kimmel and Short were both pretty competent men who were caught unready and unprepared on 7 December. Such events happens all the times in military history. It was Kimmel and Short's misfortune that they were in command and they were complacent. One characteristic that no military commander should not have!!

The book doesn't appears to recongized this factor. I am bit surprised that someone of Edward Beach's reputation would support such dilly-dally civilian blame game. How truly un-Navy like in perception and words.

PS: It should be noted that in 1999, the US Senate did cleared both Kimmel and Short. In the atmosphere of political correctness, that must have been nice but I wondered how the men under their commands feel. Japanese may have dropped the bombs but thanks to Kimmel and Short, their jobs were made easier.

Captain Beach's SCAPEGOATS: A DEFENSE OF KIMMEL AND SHORT AT PEARL HARBOR was published by the Naval Institute Press in March 1995. I corresponded with Captain Beach for two or three years prior to his decision to write SCAPEGOATS. A few words about the late Captain Edward L. Beach before examining this particular book, and Ned Beach's motive for writing and publishing this book.

Edward L. Beach graduated second among the 581 midshipmen from the Naval Academy's Class of 1939. Because of his Academy background---to say nothing of his high class standing, and the fact that Beach served two tours as naval aide to President Eisenhower and was a nuclear submariner (like my late father), I had great expectations for this book.

I first read SCAPEGOATS in late March and early April 1995. At that point I'd been working on a book about Pearl Harbor myself. Should my Pearl Harbor MS ever get published, its title will be: CLOSING THE LOOP ON PEARL HARBOR.

SCAPEGOATS wants its readers to believe that criticial intelligence available in the Navy and War Departments was denied to Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter C. Short in Hawaii. This is the same story that virtually every other Pearl Harbor revisionist has been telling readers for over 60 years.

We're told - there is testimony to back this up - that "Hawaii (or Kimmel or Short) didn't have a PURPLE machine." We're also told that the Army and Navy on Oahu didn't share the "limited" intelligence that each service did have. The Navy's communications intelligence unit at Pearl Harbor (a.k.a. Station HYPO) was using traffic analysis and call sign recoveries rather than cryptanalysis to learn what they could from Japanese naval codes and ciphers.

We're also told that Admirals (and Generals as relates to the War Department's sending intelligence to General Short) prevented or otherwise failed to send intelligence to Admiral Kimmel on Oahu.

Readers who wish to believe Captain Beach's (and every other revisionist's story about Pearl Harbor) are encouraged to read Admiral James O. Richardson's ON THE TREADMILL TO PEARL HARBOR and Navy Basic War Plan, Rainbow 5 (WPL-46), published as JCC Exhibit 129 in the 39-volume PEARL HARBOR ATTACK HEARINGS. Now go back and read JCC Exhibit 115, the so-called daily ComInt summaries from CIU, Pearl Harbor dated between 1 November and 6 December 1941. (Allegedly photostatic copies of the original Com14 daily ComInt summaries; all these documents were sanitized prior to being made exhibits of the Hewitt Inquiry, Clausen Investigation and the JCC on Pearl Harbor. In short, these documents are not the originals. Refer also to F.D. Parker's PEARL HARBOR REVISITED: UNITED STATES NAVY COMMUNICATIONS INTELLIGENCE, 1924-1941, National Security Agency, Fort Meade, MD, p. 71: "edited copies of the COM-14 Daily Summaries for the period 1 November-6 December 1941 may also be found in PHA, Part 17, 2601-42." Both Rear Admiral Kimmel and Captain Edwin T. Layton testified to the JCC in 1946 that the documents in JCC Exhibit 115 were "photostatic copies of the original documents." Both RADM Kimmel and Captain Layton gave the JCC disinformation, not misinformation. In the interest of national security, both men were lying.)

Over breakfast on Sunday, 7 December 1941, Admiral James O. Richardson (then serving on the General Board in the Navy Department) told his wife that he wouldn't be surprised at war breaking out "any moment." Compare what J.O. told Vice Admiral George C. Dyer in ON THE TREADMILL TO PEARL HARBOR with what Admiral Kimmel states in his Roberts Commission testimony, his Navy Court of Inquiry testimony, his Army Pearl Harbor Board testimony, and his JCC testimony. After you've read all of Kimmel's testimony, (and ADMIRAL KIMMEL'S STORY published in 1955), do you still believe much of what he testified to and wrote?

SCAPEGOATS was published by the Naval Institute Press in 1995. In 2010 the Naval Institute (of which I am a life member) published BENEATH THE WAVES: THE LIFE OF CAPTAIN EDWARD L. BEACH. Much to the Naval Institute's credit, Edward F. Finch, BENEATH THE WAVES author, notes on p. 164: "At a meeting of scholars who supported the reopening of the Kimmel case, the WASHINGTON POST reported that Ned (Captain Beach) announced the forthcoming publication of the book (SCAPEGOATS) with the caveat that it would be `an emotional rather than a factual rearguing of the Kimmel case.'" So here you have it: The late, great Captain Beach admitted publicly that his book was "emotional rather than factual."

Don't waste your money on SCAPEGOATS: A DEFENSE OF KIMMEL AND SHORT AT PEARL HARBOR. This book - like so many of the others (mostly written by former Navy officers) - is a cover-up.

(For more in-depth comments on Pearl Harbor please refer to my Amazon.com review of George Victor's THE PEARL HARBOR MYTH: RETHINKING THE UNTHINKABLE. Victor's three primary conclusions as referred to by Rear Admiral T.A. Brooks and quoted in my review are right on the money. Please bear in mind, however, that FDR wasn't the only high level American official who "knew that a Japanese attack was coming and knew the target to be Pearl Harbor." Yes, we had excellent intelligence in Washington, D.C. and in the Phillipines. And among flag and general officers on Oahu.)

Andy McKane IV
Missoula, Montana
(Review updated by A. McKane IV, 0302, Sunday, 6 March 2011)