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Fred Borch
and Daniel Martinez, Kimmel, Short, and Pearl
Harbor: The Final Report Revealed. Annapolis, MD:
Naval Institute Press, 2005. 215
pp., photographs, maps, appendices, annotated bibliography, index.
Reviewed by G. Alan Knight
U.S. Army Center of Military History
_____________________________________________________________________
Within the
many books produced on the topic of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a variety of opinions subsequently
emerged as to the degree of responsibility that should be apportioned to
the two key commanders, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Lieutenant General
Walter C. Short. Perhaps less well-known is the record of efforts to
rehabilitate the reputations of both officers and more specifically, to
restore them while alive, and later posthumously, to the ranks they held on
December 7, 1941
and until their retirement in their lower permanent grades in early 1942.
Borch and Martinez have collaborated in providing not
only the full report of the Department of Defense investigation mounted in
1995, but in providing germane
background information relative to this and previous inquiries, and in
supplementing the basic report with a well-researched commentary on the
report’s findings. The report has
become unofficially known as the Dorn Report, named after Edwin Dorn, the
then-Under-Secretary of Defense who headed the investigation and submitted
the final report to the Secretary of Defense. Borch and Martinez are especially well-equipped to author this
book since Borch, a military lawyer, served as
the Army’s representative to the investigating team, and Martinez has served for some years as the
Chief Historian for the U.S. Park Service at the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial.
While
there has been a plethora of books on the attack, previous authors have
relied upon results of investigations and inquiries conducted in the 1940s.
While the approved Dorn Report recommended no posthumous restoration of
grade on the retired list of the respective services, it breaks new ground
by holding neither officer liable for the totality of the debacle of
December 7th. The report is also unsupportive of a variety of
conspiracy theories though it departs from prior inquiry-based conclusions
in allocating a degree of culpability to others such as Admiral Stark,
General Marshall, and General Gerow.
An
interesting sidelight commented upon, and not well-known, was the 1944
action of the Army Board for the Correction of Military Records (ABCMR)
whose three member panel voted with one dissent, to restore General Short,
on the retired list, to his highest grade held on the basis that the 1944
Army Board of Inquiry had determined Short not to have been derelict in the
performance of duty. Unfortunately for the long-deceased Short whose appeal
was filed by his son, the lone dissenting view on the panel was adopted by
the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army who denied the relief sought.
This position was again sustained by the Secretary of the Army in 1995.
Borch and Martinez
are not only intimately familiar with the various reports of inquiries and
investigations but also with the vast literature associated with the 1941
attack. The often erroneous conclusions of many of these authors are
refuted by Borch and Martinez who relate their assessment to
the cited reports. One can conclude that along with this publication of the
Dorn Report, there are really only two other books deemed to have achieved
the requisite degree of objectivity and comprehensiveness. The authors
comment favorably upon Gordon W. Prange’s At Dawn We Slept and Roberta Wohlstetter’s Pearl
Harbor: Warning and Decision.
The
central finding of the Dorn Commission is that Kimmel and Short failed to
recognize that their primary mission was preparation for war with Japan,
a reasonable expectation in light of the rapidly deteriorating relationship
between the two powers in the months, weeks and days prior to December 7th.
By failing to heed the likelihood of war’s outbreak, Kimmel and Short
failed to institute reasonable readiness measures, especially in light of
the November 27, 1941
message which suggested the imminence of hostilities. While General
Marshall, General Gerow, and Admiral Stark are
the more significant members of a supporting cast of those contributing to
the disaster, their shortfalls in transmitting sufficient and more precise
information to Kimmel and Short do not absolve the two. The ultimate
conclusion is that both those Oahu-based commanders were mentally unready,
focused on divining Japanese intent rather than their operational capabilities, and in general
displaying a lack of imagination as a result of which they became unable or
unwilling to institute appropriate measures in the face of a clearly
escalating threat.
In reading
this work, this reviewer was also struck by the degree to which Kimmel and
Short were, sadly, of an early 20th century mentality in which the lessons
of modern warfare and recognition of the added value inherent in some of
the latest technological developments did not resonate appreciably with
either man. Both failed to display air-mindedness, in part evident by their
disregard of the dangerous potential of an enemy mounting a carrier-based
aerial attack. Neither seemed to pay much if any attention to the lessons
learned from the November 1940 attack by the British on the Italian fleet
at Taranto,
notwithstanding a June 13, 1941
memorandum by the deputy of the Chief of Naval Operations to commanders of
all U.S. Naval Districts, with a copy to Kimmel. This memorandum
highlighted the results of torpedo plane attacks. Furthermore, the concept
of an aerial attack on Pearl Harbor was
not new, having been surfaced by the late General Billy Mitchell in 1924 at
time of a visit to the islands. He in fact had predicted an aerial attack.
Subsequent fleet exercises and war games in the 1930s incorporated
simulated air attacks, clearly sounding a warning bell.
Relative
to technology, radar held no apparent promise for Short or Kimmel. Finally,
it is apparent that Kimmel and Short were, as a result of their inherent
bureaucratic tendencies nurtured over many years, unwilling to engage in
adequate information-sharing or to ask pointed questions that deserved
airing. Both were poor choices for
creating the degree of joint cooperation essential to planning
realistically and in a timely manner for the growing Japanese threat.
Of the two officers that are at the
center of the Dorn Report, Kimmel appears more guilty of errors of judgment
while Short comes across as a general of unusual caution and lack of
imagination which of course contributed to his own errors of judgment. One
wonders about the thought that went into his assignment, given his primary
career focus as a trainer. In the wake of the disaster, both men appear to
have taken refuge in obsessing over what they saw as the failure of Navy
and Army leadership to provide them adequate warning of war’s imminence.
In
adversity, both men supported each other but the Dorn Commission report
clearly identifies Admiral Kimmel as being more culpable by virtue of withholding
key information from General Short, and in the wake of the November 27, 1941 war warning
from the Chief of Naval Operations, failing to execute an appropriate
defensive deployment, albeit a step he should have begun comprehensively
implementing long before the Sunday morning surprise arrival of Commander Mitsuo Fuchida and his fleet
of aircraft.
Interest
in Pearl Harbor seems not to have dimmed
with the passage of the years. However Kimmel,
Short, and Pearl Harbor seems destined to be one of the trio of best–researched
treatments available and essential reading.
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