The former Pacific Fleet intelligence officer recounts the deciphering of Japanese codes before Pearl Harbor, the failures and mishaps that contributed to the disaster, and intelligence activities in the Pacific.

Pearl Harbor. 7 December 1941, Japanese bombs and torpedoes slam into the battleships of the Pacific Fleet as Commander Edwin T. Layton leaps up the stairs to his second-floor office. “Ah,” says Captain Willard Kitts, the staff gunnery officer, “here’s the man we should have been listening to all along.”

Feeling numb and sick, Layton looked out his window. He could see Oklahoma upside down and Arizona ablaze.

Why did the Japanese attack? How had they inflicted the greatest military defeat in American history? What had gone wrong?

“And I Was There” is the first block by a top ranking American navy officer can answer these questions.  Admiral Layton scrupulously kept these secrets to himself – for forty-three years – until recently, when the government released half a million classified documents from its intelligence archives.  Only then did Layton believe he was freed to tell his story.  His Revelations are incredible.  He names those who knew about the Japanese intentions, how they acquired their knowledge, and how they misused it.

Layton gives a blow-by-blow account of a war within the war, of admirals fighting admirals.  It is a tale of a men in Washington vying for power and for turf while disregarding the national interest.  It is an account of a secret deal between Roosevelt and Churchill, a new strategy that projected the B-17 bombers in Macarthur's air force making a preemptive raids on the Japanese homeland.  It is the documented narrative of how this deterrent strategy failed, and how our leaders in Washington – both civilian and military – forgot about Pearl Harbor, until it was too late!

Layton speaks with unique authority.  He was the Pacific Fleet's intelligence officer prior to Pearl Harbor, and he continued to serve in the same role for Admiral Nimitz throughout the war.  As Layton says: He Was There.

His account is more than just the story of Pearl Harbor, however.  This is the first book to detail the background of the secret radio intelligence war against Japan that began in the early 1920s.  He also breaks the story of how Washington repeated its blunders of Pearl Harbor and almost lost a crucial battle of Midway.  He reveals the intelligence coups of other battles: that Coral Sea, the Philippine Sea, Leyte Gulf, Tarawa, Guadalcanal, Kwajalein, and the Aleutians.  Layton speaks in salty, unvarnished prose; he calls the shots as he saw them.

“And I Was There” demonstrates how much America owes to a small band of dedicated men who sacrificed their careers so that America would know the capabilities and the objectives of its enemy.  Theirs was not a game of politics and personal advancement.  They were at the heart of the secret war on which the fate of America rested.