Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War

George Morgenstern’s Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War has to be one of the bravest books ever written. It’s a wonder it came out at all, but it did, in 1947, just as the war ended and FDR had died. It argues that the bombing was not unexpected, but provoked—and even wanted—by the administration as a “backdoor to the war” that FDR really desired as a means to rescue his presidency. This was not an unknown fact a few years earlier but the war victory led to a situation where it as considered unpatriotic and downright nasty to look back and say what was widely known only a few years earlier.Such is the way war scrambles people’s brains. Nonetheless, the book appeared and created an incredible frenzy of denunciation and hysteria; it has been the template for war revisionism ever since. Since that time, however, more and more books have come out that only reinforce the point that Morgenstern was making, among which is Percy Greaves’s Pearl Harbor.