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CougarGA7: "Of the two I can say unequivocally that Victor's is the poorest work on the subject I've ever seen produced. Though I hear Layton's work is pretty bad too.."

Let's see if I can provide some perspective on this subject.
As a historian, you doubtless know the names of both David Irving and John Keegan?
Keegan is possibly the most highly respected living historian, while Irving the most thoroughly discredited.
Yet Irving was not always in such disrepute -- years ago he was said to have done some good work and received favorable comments from people like John Keegan.

What happened was that Irving fell in with a bad crowd, basically, he went a little nuts, and then hoping to restore his reputation, brought a libel suit against a woman who, it turned out, was fully able to defend herself.

In her defense, Deborah Lipstadt brought in, among others, Professor Richard J. Evans, historian and Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, as an expert witness.

"Evans' report was the most comprehensive, in-depth examination of Irving's work:
'Not one of [Irving's] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject.
All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about. ... if we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian.' "

Irving lost his own suit, was ordered to pay court costs, which forced him to declare bankruptcy. And it went even further down hill from there, when he wound up in an Austrian jail for the crime of, basically, lying.

I mention all this here because it serves as an abject lesson to wannabe "historians" who imagine that "history" is their personal play-ground to be re-written in whatever shape suits their fantasies. Beware!

And my point is, Cougar, there's nothing I've ever seen suggesting, much less proving, that any recent Pearl Harbor author -- even Toland, much less Stinnett or Victor -- fall into the David Irving class of historian-scoundrels.

Yes, maybe, objectively, factually speaking, that's where they belong -- but first: I don't believe it for a moment, and second: to "prove" such a charge, you'd need a real historian of the recognized caliber of, say, a Richard Evans on the Holocaust, to thoroughly analyze and critique their work.
Then you'd want other scholars to critique that work.
Now you'd begin to get some sense as to just which data you can rely on, and which not so much.

But to my knowledge, none of this has been done.
Yes, the name Jacobsen is sometimes mentioned, but as with Major Clausen, I can't consider him a "disinterested party."
As far as I'm concerned, these are people defending both themselves and their buddies.
That doesn't necessarily mean they are lying, but it does suggest we need someone more disinterested to take a closer look.

I'll be very interested when that happens.