Three Days to Pearl

the long version

"As a young Royal Air Force technician stationed in Malaya in 1941, Peter Shepherd was ordered on a clandestine mission to Japanese-occupied Indo-China where he heard about a Japanese naval task force secretly on its way to Hawaii to annihilate the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. He also learned of Japan's plan to simultaneously decimate Royal Air Force installations throughout Malaya and Singapore Island. After making his way back to the airbase in northern Malaya, he immediately alerted British intelligence officials of the pending catastrophe. Three days later Japan carried out its infamous attack on Pearl Harbor - an hour or so after its invasion of Malaya. During an air raid on his airfield, Shepherd was seriously wounded and spent the next two years in the hospital. Plainly, his urgent warnings had fallen on deaf ears.". "Shepherd tells his story as he experienced it, with authentication, where possible, from official records. No one else has ever disclosed the existence of this kind of prior firsthand information about the twentieth-century's worst naval disaster. The book reads like a novel and strongly evokes the feeling of apprehension that gripped Southeast Asia in the days before Japan unleashed its forces. Readers will be mesmerized by the author's description of his chance encounter with a Japanese engineer who revealed that he had been working aboard a carrier bound for Pearl Harbor. Had authorities acted on Shepherd's warning, the course of history would have changed dramatically. This story will attract the interest of World War II aficionados everywhere."--BOOK JACKET.