For more than fifty years, historians have searched for the truth behind the Japanese raid on Pearl Hareor on December 7, 1941-and the disaster that overtook the Phi lippines nine hours later, when Generai Douglas MacArthur's air force was destroyed on the ground at Clark Field.
The question of who really was to blame for the twin disasters has been one of the most bitterly contested debates in American history. The political and military demands of wartime made the Hawaiian commandersAdmiral Husband E. Kimmel and Generai Walter C. Short-scapegoats for Pearl Harbor, while Generai MacArthur emerged unscathed from the far greater debacle in the Philippines.
Now, drawing on recently declassified American and British top-secret docume nts, New York Times bestselling historian John Costello reveals how major strategie and diplomatic miscalculations by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston S. Churchill together with the military blunders committed by Generai MacArthur set the stage for Japan's successful attacks on Pearl Harbor and Clark Field. For the first time, he documents how it was the devastating loss of air power in the Philippines-and not the battleships lost at Pearl-which permitted Japan's lightning conquest of the Far East in 1942.
MacArthur, Churchill and Roosevelt. For more than half a century, their guilt has remained shrouded in a historical haze of hero worship and official cover-up. But after more than a decade of research, John Costello has ferreted out the shocking, long-hidden truth-a shameful litany of strategie errors, diplomatic bungling, and military malfeasance that adds up to a devastating indictment of three giants of the twentieth century [...] ( )