Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy

Percy and Bettina Greaves [Pearl Harbor:  The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy, Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama, 2010, 937 pages] never mention, but more than justify Vice President Joe Biden’s pre-election comment that, “[The Rear Admiral Kimmel and Major General Short matter] is the most tragic injustice in American military history.”  And they do so without ever using the word, conspiracy.  Just the facts—mainly those uttered under oath by the principals involved, many who are thus injured by the testimony that they intended to use to injure others:  Army Chief of Staff George Marshall and Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark most notably.  The fact that the Department of Defense remains almost willfully obtuse to these facts continues to disappoint; indeed, amaze.

In 2000, the Congress, led by then Senator Joe Biden, passed a law recommending that the President posthumously advance Kimmel and Short to their highest held temporary ranks in World War II in accordance with the Officer Personnel Act of 1947 from which they alone have been punitively excluded.  Percy Greaves deceased in 1984, the same year that the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association (PHSA) initiated the preceding action. Clearly, PHSA would have referenced this book in its decades long struggle had it been available to them. Before the sun finally sets on PHSA the matter should be revisited using this book as exhibit A+: a well-deserved A+.

The Seeds:  A chronological trace of the conflicting forces from 1894 that led the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor in 1941.   The chronology depicts a well-informed President secretly making, but not declaring war; or an innocently-surprised President honorably standing on principle.  The reader is prompted to decide.
The Seeds alone is worth the price of the book, but the payoff is The Fruits.
The Fruits:  Another chronology, but this time by a Pearl-Harbor story principal, Percy Greaves, who served as the minority counsel for the Joint Congressional Committee (JCC) investigating the attack.  This makes the book perhaps the last first-hand account of the Pearl-Harbor story we will ever get, which by itself automatically makes the book unique, and important. 
Greaves is at his best describing what he knows best, his work for JCC member Senator Homer Ferguson.  Greaves suggested the lead that led to the highlight of the entire JCC proceeding—the testimony of Navy Commander Lester R. Schultz, who on December 6th delivered the 13th part of the 14-part Japanese response to the American Note of November 26, 1941, prompting the President to famously say, “This means war.”  This in turn prompted investigators to wonder if the President could possibly read this secret communication from the enemy, declare that, “this means war,” and not immediately reach out for the heads of his army and navy.  Thus begins the sycophantic stories of Marshall’s mendacity and Stark’s shame presented in their own disgraceful words chronologically.
Greaves presents news to this life-long student of the attack.  Commander Joe Rochefort, the cyptographic hero of the June 4-7, 1941, Battle of Midway, inexplicably was also a casualty of the post-Pearl Harbor attack personnel changes and ordered in October 1942 to command a floating drydock in San Francisco.  Enroute he serendipitously met Kimmel in New York and gave Kimmel his first hint that crucial information about Japanese intentions had been available in Washington prior to the attack, which had not been relayed to him in Pearl Harbor.  This then may well have been the genesis of Kimmel’s long march toward vindication, and helped explain why the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in Washington, D.C., which Kimmel was forced to rely on prior to the Pearl Harbor attack, was ignored by Kimmel’s successor, Admiral Nimitz, after the attack. Indeed, ONI was not even aware of the Battle of Midway until it was over.  Rochefort’s belated vindication came posthumously in 1985 when awarded the Distinguished Service Medal.

Bettina Greaves demonstrates enormous discipline by offering almost nothing that was learned after her husband deceased in 1984.  This adds much to the credibility of the work, which, of course, is attributed to him.  Nonetheless, Mrs. Greaves must have been sorely tempted to include a host of relevant information made public since 1984—a couple of examples should suffice for the point:

1. President Reagan's Director of Central Intelligence William Casey wrote in 1988 that, “The British had sent word that a Japanese fleet was steaming east toward Hawaii.”
(William Casey, The Secret War Against Hitler, 1988, p.7);

2. MI6’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) Chairman Victor Cavendish-Bentinck reportedly said that, “We knew that [the Japanese Fleet] had changed course [by Friday, December 5, 1941]. I remember presiding over a JIC meeting and being told that a Japanese Fleet was sailing in the direction of Hawaii, asking ‘Have we informed our transatlantic brethren?’ and receiving an affirmative reply.” (Richard Aldrich, Intelligence and the War Against Japan, Cambridge Press, 2000, p.87); 

3. Sir Julian Ridsdale, member of the JIC, "Recalled a JIC meeting at which radio silence adopted by the Japanese fleet was discussed and its possible destinations reviewed. Pearl Harbor was one of the targets thought most likely and as a result a warning telegram was despatched to Washington. [He later] met with Cavendish-Bentinck and confirmed that a warning telegram had been despatched." (Richard Aldrich, Intelligence and the War Against Japan, Cambridge Press, 2000, p.87); 

4. Army Pearl Harbor Board (APHB) Member USA General Henry Russell’s APHB reminiscences. (Henry Russell, Pearl Harbor Story, 2001 {written 1946});

5. Admiral Arthur McCollum’s October 7, 1940 “Action Proposal” to D/ONI revealed in 1999 by Robert Stinnett, Day of Deceit.; and 

6. VENONA declassification in 1995 by NSA confirming that Harry Dexter White and Launchlin Currie were Soviet spies.

Percy Greaves once wrote that there was no need to go beyond the known facts in telling the Pearl Harbor story.  He was correct, and this book is testament to a noble effort to get the facts straight as he knew them.


Tom Kimmel is a former naval officer, a retired FBI agent, and a grandson of Admiral Kimmel. For

I rate this volume Excellent before reading it and ordering it, which I will do today, for I was a personal friend of Percy Greaves and learned the true story from him years ago. I have been writing about FDR's "Day of Infamy" for 50 years, and I long ago read most if not all of the revisionist books which exposed the Pearl Harbor hoax shortly after World War II, but which were suppressed by the mainstream book reviewers and media. Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Toland's book "Infamy," published many years after WWII, shed belated light on this story. Toland got a lot of his information from Percy, who told me about his contacts with Toland. In my opinion, Toland's book was a great contribution, but he did not reach some final conclusions quite as fully as I have, through information I got from Greaves and some of the earlier revisionists. Percy Greaves was the most knowledgeable person in the world on this subject. I am grateful that Bettina Greaves has published his work finally.

Many books have appeared over the years about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. And among them have been outstanding "revisionist" works challenging the "court history" of America's "innocence" in the events leading up to that "date that will live in infamy."

But none of these excellent histories have offered the detail and thoroughness of Percy Greaves' important work. He lived through the times, served with the Republicans when the Congressional investigations were undertaken on the background of the attack, and knew all the "facts" from the inside. 

While approaching his subject with a point-of-view, no one can accuse Percy of an "axe-to-grind." He is interested in honestly and factually tracing out the ideas, actions, and consequences of FDR's foreign policy leading up to December 7, 1941. 

But the conclusion at the end of the book is that FDR maneuvered U.S. and Japanese relations into a corner that had to lead to one end -- conflict in the Pacific.

Richard Ebeling