Drawing on recently declassified American and British documents to reexamine a crucial chapter in modern history, a historian reveals the secret deals and diplomatic and strategic blunders that led to Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and Clark Field. 15,000 first printing. Historian Costello (Ten Days to Destiny, LJ 7/91) here takes on the tangled web of intrigue, personalities, and politics surrounding of the tragic events at Pearl Harbor and the loss of the Philippines in 1941-42. Costello relates a litany of miscalculations and outright manipulation that cost the United States and Britain dearly. In his indictment of Churchill, MacArthur, and Roosevelt, he shows expert command of recently declassified documents and primary source material. Costello reveals that it was the loss of U.S. airpower in the Philippines, not the loss of U.S. warships at Pearl Harbor, that facilitated Japanese victories in the Pacific. (For a complementary view, see William Bartsch's Doomed at the Start: American Pursuit Pilots in the Philippines, 1941-1942, LJ 4/1/92.) A well-researched, convincing, and thought-provoking study; recommended for general collections and those with large diplomatic/military history holdings. Thomas G. Anton, Field Museum, Chicago Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. Costello's second investigation into the advance warnings of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor rivals the investigation of the JFK murder for devising conspiracy theories to account for what happened. In its most outr{‚}e permutation, the "plot" has FDR deliberately withholding intelligence from the commanders in Hawaii so the country would go into war united. Actual responsibility for the disaster is more prosaic and varied, involving bureaucratic turf wars, the substitution of the Philippines for Hawaii (at MacArthur's behest, as a strategic bastion for B-17 bombers), and numerous intelligence lapses. The chronicle of the latter, according to Costello's research, was contained in a 1946 navy report kept secret until 1993. Entitled Pre-Pearl Harbor Japanese Naval Dispatches , it concluded that the U.S. Navy had all the coded messages it needed to deduce the time and places of Japan's commencement of hostilities--but they were not decrypted. This is not the last word on the run-up to the Pacific war, but these densely packed facts should arrest readers' interest until the next secrets come out--said to concern Churchill's advance knowledge of Japan's war plans. Did the old bulldog conceal his information from the Americans? The British won't tell us that for 25 more years. Gilbert Taylor