Remember Pearl Harbor?

ADMIRAL KIMMEL'S STORY (206 pp.)--Husband E. Kimmel&#;Regnery ($3.75).

"Until this day I have kept silence on the subject of Pearl Harbor," writes Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, 72. "Now, however, I deem it my duty to speak out.'' In testimony at inquiries, Kimmel previously implied that Washington kept vital information from him before the Japanese struck at his fleet. Books by his partisans have done the same. Now Kimmel makes the direct charge for the first time: "This lack of action on the part of both the War and Navy Departments must have been in accordance with high political direction.''

Admiral Kimmel is entitled to tear off an angry book. As the responsible commander on the spot, he and the late General Walter Short were singled out as scapegoats for those U.S. leaders who blundered in assuming the Hawaiian base safe from attack. Relieved from command, Kimmel was refused the court-martial that might have shown whether or not he deserved to bear all the blame alone. And when finally he got a hearing at a postwar congressional investigation, his countrymen were by then persuaded that the real blunderers at Pearl Harbor were the Japanese, and the old salt was swamped in a sea of politicians' words.

Spy System. Everything considered, the admiral has presented his case with brevity, restraint and a quarterdeck command of facts now long on the record. The U.S. was unready at Pearl Harbor, says Kimmel, but not by his fault. The trouble, he says, was that Washington never told him what was cooking or where and when it might boil over. All through November, for instance, Washington was reading intercepted messages in which the Japanese consulate in Hawaii sent Tokyo pinpoint locations of Pearl Harbor warships. Says Kimmel: "The information received during the ten days preceding the attack clearly pointed to the Fleet at Pearl Harbor as the Japanese objective, yet not one word of warning and none of this information was given to the Hawaiian Commanders."

War Warning. It is clear that--possibly to safeguard the secret that the U.S. was cracking Japanese codes--Washington did not give Kimmel all the information he needed. But special commissions, Army and Navy boards and congressional committees have gone through all this, and it is a fact that on Nov. 27, 1941 the Navy Department sent Kimmel a formal "war warning." He might have been more alert, might, for instance, have ordered distant air searches when his own intelligence officer told him that he had suddenly lost four Japanese carriers, i.e., could not place them at their usual empire bases.

A lot of what Kimmel says makes sense. It is easy to be sympathetic with the unhappy admiral. It is harder to go along with him when he concludes: "I cannot excuse those in authority in Washington for what they did . . . In my book they must answer on the Day of Judgment like any other criminal."

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