Day of Lighting, Years of Scorn: Walter C. Short and the Attack on Pearl Harbor

Hardcover, 240 pp., 2005 Walter C. Short is remembered as the U.S. Army general who parked his airplanes wingtip-to-wingtip making them easy targets for Japanese pilots attacking Hawaii on December 7, 1941. History's harsh indictment of his actions as commander of the Army's Hawaiian department is the result of a series of investigations that placed blame for the disaster on General Short and his Navy counterpart, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel. Over the years various books on Pearl Harbor have presented Short and Kimmel as either fools or scapegoats for Washington officials attempting to hide their own errors. In this long overdue first biography of Short, the general emerges as an honorable man who made some errors. Charles Anderson's balanced portrayal acknowledges that Short bore responsibility for certain charges made against him, but it also provides ample evidence that Short's superiors worked hard to blame him and Kimmel as a way of avoiding their own culpability. Anderson's thoroug