Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement: The Shocking True Story of the Military Intelligence Failure at Pearl Harbor and the Fourteen Men Responsible for the Disaster

Henry C. Clausen · Bruce Lee

Jul 2015 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

This account of the top secret investigation is “essential history . . . the authoritative appraisal of why American armed forces met the Japanese attack asleep” (The Christian Science Monitor).

On December 6, 1941, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander in chief of the United States Pacific Fleet, assured his staff that the Japanese would not attack Pearl Harbor. The next morning, Japanese carriers steamed toward Hawaii to launch one of the most devastating surprise attacks in the history of war, proving the admiral disastrously wrong. Immediately, an investigation began into how the American military could have been caught so unaware.
 
The results of the initial investigation failed to implicate who was responsible for this intelligence debacle. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, realizing that high-ranking members of the military had provided false testimony, decided to reopen the investigation by bringing in an unknown major by the name of Henry C. Clausen. Over the course of ten months, from November 1944 to September 1945, Clausen led an exhaustive investigation. He logged more than fifty-five thousand miles and interviewed over one hundred military and civilian personnel, ultimately producing an eight-hundred-page report that brought new evidence to light. Clausen left no stone unturned in his dogged effort to determine who was truly responsible for the disaster at Pearl Harbor.
 
Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement reveals all of the eye-opening details of Clausen’s investigation and is a damning account of massive intelligence failure. To this day, the story surrounding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor stokes controversy and conspiracy theories. This book provides conclusive evidence that shows how the US military missed so many signals and how it could have avoided the events of that fateful day.

About the author

Bruce Lee is a military historian, author, and editor. His books include Marching Orders: How the American Breaking of the Japanese Diplomatic and Military Secret Codes Led to the Defeat of Nazi Germany and Japan and, with coauthor Henry C. Clausen, Pearl Harbor: The Shocking True Story of the Military Intelligence Failure at Pearl Harbor and the Fourteen Men Responsible for the Disaster. Lee has been an editor-researcher for Cornelius Ryan and has edited the works of other renowned historians and authors, including Gordon W. Prange, Admiral Edwin T. Layton, Ronald Lewin, Charles B. MacDonald, and Pulitzer Prize winner David J. Garrow.
 
Henry C. Clausen was a trial lawyer and an assistant US attorney in San Francisco. In 1944 secretary of war Henry L. Stimson ordered young Major Clausen to investigate the proximate causes of the disaster at Pearl Harbor. For the first time, witnesses were forced to tell the truth about the military’s failure to exploit the priceless intelligence obtained by the United States before the attack.

In 1945 Clausen was awarded the Legion of Merit, then the highest honor a citizen could receive for service during wartime. He also served as president of the Scottish Rite’s Mother Supreme Council of the World and as the sovereign grand commander of the Supreme Council of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. With coauthor Bruce Lee, Clausen wrote Pearl Harbor, which critics have acclaimed as being “so well grounded it makes all further speculation on the subject seem pointless.”