Lt. Cmdr. Kramer

No, He did believe an attack was coming, along with Col Bratton. Neither of them suspected it would be Pearl Harbor however. but like everyone else, thought it would be in the Far East, against the Philippines, etc...

So that part of it was accurate. Their actual actions on the night of and early morning of the 6th/7th was quite a bit fictionalized. In the film, they were cast as the unsung heroes trying to raise the alarm.

In real life, while they did play a hand in raising the alarm, they shouldered quite a bit of blame themselves for the interminable delays.

For example, Kramer is shown being driven all over DC in the middle of the night by his wife trying to reach various superiors.

In truth, he tried contacting one superior, when that person was out for the night, he went home himself to pick up the effort again the next morning.

If you enjoy reading and are interested in a more objective reality than Hollywood. I suggest you read the Henry C Clausen's "Pearl Harbor: Final Judgment"

Clausen worked directly for Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. As a special investigator, he was tasked with his own independent investigation into the matter of the Pearl Harbor attack.

Most of the investigations, to include the official Congressional Investigation was hampered by the fact that the investigators were not cleared (security-wise) into Magic and the breaking of the Japanese codes. As a result, their investigations were filled with omissions and lies told by witnesses (who were cleared) to prevent that secret from being exposed.
Clausen literally traveled through the warzones with the actual Magic messages secured in a bomb filled tamper resistant case strapped to his chest. If any witness started lying to him or refusing to tell the whole truth, he would pull out these dispatches to PROVE to them that he was in fact cleared and they had to tell him everything.

As such, his investigation is the only 100% complete investigation into who knew what and when and what they did in the hours preceding and during the attack.

He issued his findings in an 800 page "Clausen Report" to Secretary Stimson.

Many years later, in 1991 in his old age, he wrote of his report on book form in order to put to rest many of the conspiracy theories that sprung up around the Pearl Harbor events. Clausen died 2 years after the book was published.

Quite a few were blamed (and there was plenty of blame to go around) in his report. Even the supposed scapegoats of Pearl, Kimmel and Short, did bear some blame Though not the level to which they were in fact left out as the scapegoats.

Of all those that caught blame, the one person that shouldered the most blame was Edwin T. Layton, Kimmel's Chief of Intelligence.


Layton is one of the Codebreaking Heroes of WW2, however he was a bit of a jackass who refused to share what he knew and had an attitude of "I know something that you don't, that makes me important and you not".
He alone held most of the blame for the lack of intelligence being received by those who had need of it.


http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/pha/clausen/clausen.html


I joined the Navy to see the world, only to discover the world is 2/3 water!