Douglas Ford (1)

While a bit turgid for a monograph the author does achieve his aim, which is to illustrate that the U.S. Navy's mistakes in estimating the Japanese threat before the attack on Pearl Harbor had less to do with racism and more to do with creating a mirror image of the Japanese military, in which American policy makers assumed that, with the limited resources at hand, Tokyo would play a cautious game, rather than making a maximum attack in an attempt to shock the opposition into submission. Thus, from 1941 on, whatever the hard evidence might suggest the U.S. naval planners never assumed that the Japanese could not rebound from failure to inflict further setbacks to the American war effort. Much of this book is less about intelligence collection and analysis and more about how the U.S.N., in the absence of hard information, simply refined its own way of war and kept on its guard for new operational and technological shocks from the Japanese military.… (more)