The problem with research

One of the regrets of historical research is now and then you come across a fascinating story that you cannot shoehorn into the narrative you are constructing, which in this case was my novel The Great Liars, which went up this week on Amazon and Kindle. Peter Shepherd, who was an 18-year-old Royal Air Force mechanic stationed in Malaya in 1941 as the war clouds darkened. He waited nearly sixty years to tell his story because, as he wrote in Three Days to Pearl (Naval Institute Press, 2000), to do so earlier “may have stirred up enduring ill will between Great Britain and the United States.”
I came across Shepherd’s account in the course of years of research into the period leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, an event that saw the U.S. enter the war against Germany before it was too late. Hitler’s legions had conquered most of Europe with its new Blitzkrieg style of war, and Britain was beginning to starve from the noose U-boats were tightening around shipping. Some in the ruling class believed the country could only be saved by a new government willing to negotiate a dishonorable peace after Winston Churchill was removed from power and King George forced to abdicate in favor of his older brother, the former king now the Duke of Windsor, whose pro-German sympathies were known to intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic.
Shepherd, who had joined the RAF when only fifteen, arrived in Singapore in August of 1941 in a convoy of troop ships. “I at last experienced a sense of having left the war behind, its perils, and its many depressing restrictions, far behind.”
A callow youth still, ignorant and unformed, he regarded the Japanese as “polite, humble, chivalrous, and honorable people who revered their ancestors, worshipped the emperor, and loved simple, exquisite things such as cherry blossoms and chrysanthemums.” Then he picked up a magazine one day and read about Japan’s brutal war in China and its aggressive intentions toward the Far East. “I didn’t get it.”
The British badly underestimated the Japanese; a corporal summed it up for Shepherd when ominous troop movements were reported. “Well, I can tell you this much—they won’t get very bloody far. They wouldn’t dare start anything against the British out here; we’d slam them back to Tokyo in five minutes. Who the hell are they anyway? Just a tribe of vacant faced bastards. Plus they all wear glasses. Cheeky sods!”
Shepherd was ordered to accompany a civilian pilot with a Dutch accent on a secret night mission to French Indo-China, nominally controlled by the Vichy government but already under the thumb of the Japanese army. While the pilot left to take care of business he didn’t explain, Shepherd loitered in a restaurant until time to fly back to Malaya. He met a Japanese engineer without a word of English who rapidly got drunk on cognac and became expansive. He was bursting with a secret so large he could not contain it even if he had to resort to hand gestures and a hand-drawn map. Shepherd learned he had been part of a crew of civilians who adapted bomb racks for torpedoes rigged for shallow running. The torpedoes and the aircraft that would deliver them were aboard six carriers that would attack “Purhabba,” Singapore and Malaya would be struck at the same time.
“I smiled, frowned, and shook my head as in disbelief,” Shepherd wrote, “though inwardly I had felt the sickening clutch of fear.”
As the Japanese engineer got sick over the veranda rail, Shepherd stole the hand-drawn map and departed. Back in Malaya, he was told to report the conversation to a squadron commander he had never met before, and they were immediately flown to Kuala Lumpur to brief two civilians; he assumed all three were in intelligence. Doing the calculations in his head, Shepherd told them he thought the attack on Pearl Harbor would be three days hence, on Sunday, December 7. The meeting ended, Shepherd having been ordered not to repeat his story to anyone.
Back at the airstrip, he and the other mechanics were worked to the point of exhaustion getting Blenheim bombers ready for action; one collapsed from overwork and was carried off and another couldn’t rise from a chair when he sat down. Just before sinking into sleep when at last off duty, Shepherd wrote, he felt a premonition. “Earthshaking events, evil and unspeakable, were about to erupt.” He woke to falling bombs and then the building blew up around him. He was in hospitals for two years. After the war, he became a chartered engineer, retiring to West Sussex in 1988.
What Shepherd could not know was evidence has been unearthed in the past fifteen or so years was Washington, D.C., knew the Japanese Imperial Fleet was en route to attack the Pacific Fleet. But that’s another story you will find at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IEM9TKI#r...