Since 1942 officials have condemned Adm. Husband E. Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Walter C. Short as inadequately alert, and therefore responsible for the catastrophe. With this book the highly respected naval officer and historian Capt. Edward L. Beach puts his own reputation on the line by challenging readers to overturn that judgment and right a wrong that has stood for half a century.

Captain Beach does not go along with revisionists who damn Roosevelt for getting Americans into the war and accuse him of knowing about the attack beforehand. Beach dismisses such accusations as hold-overs from the discredited isolationist movement.

But he does present ample proof that by early morning in Washington on December 7, authorities in the Army, Navy, and State Departments, as well as the White House, knew positively through special intelligence, that Japan "was up to some devilment" on that very day. Moreover, Beach says, they had seen it coming all week and were derelict in their duty to inform field commanders that things were rapidly coming to a head.

Beach further argues that the official finding against the two men failed to take into account the budget-directed shortages in aircraft and anti-aircraft ordnance that, surprise or no surprise, made the outcome of the Japanese attack inevitable.

In this impassioned but carefully reasoned plea for posthumous justice, Beach says what happened to Kimmel and Short was, for them, worse than death itself. For political and military expediency, the very country they had served so loyally condemned them to a lifetime of disgrace for a debacle that was not their fault - and did not even allow them to defend themselves. At the fiftieth anniversary of the war's end, Captain Beach's eloquent plea to set the record right may at last be heard.