Pearl Harbor Day – “A Date Which Will Live In Infamy”

Posted on by

Today is Pearl Harbor Day, which President Franklin Roosevelt called, “a date which will live in infamy.”

The Empire of Japan unleashed an hours long sneak attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in the early morning hours of a Sunday morning.

It was a devastating attack. One of the main targets of the attack was Battleship Row whereat the Japs sunk, destroyed, or damaged:

The battleship Arizona — sunk, total loss, 1,177 KIA, remains sunk at Pearl Harbor;

The battleship California — sunk, refloated, returned to service February 1944;

The battleship Maryland — damaged by direct hits, returned to service February 1942;

The battleship Nevada — managed to get underway, beached itself to avoid clogging up the main entrance to Pearl, sunk, decommissioned in 1946, shipped to Bikini Atoll as a target ship for nuclear weapons tests, sunk by Naval gunfire in 1948;

The battleship Oklahoma — sunk, total loss, never repaired;

The battleship Pennsylvania — damaged by bombs while in drydock, returned to service March 1942;

The battleship Tennessee — minor damage, repaired and returned to the fleet in February 1942;

The battleship Utah — capsized, never repaired, remains at Pearl Harbor (the Utah is often overlooked as it was not moored on Battleship Row, but was at anchor off Ford Island after returning to Pearl afollowing gunnery exercises); and,

The battleship West Virginia — sunk, refloated, returned to service July 1944.

In all, the Japs sunk or damaged the battleships above, three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship, and one minelayer. One hundred and eighty-eight US planes were destroyed on the island’s airfields while 2,403 Americans were KIA and 1,178 were WIA. The Japs did not touch the American aircraft carrier fleet as they were at sea. It was the only good luck for the Americans that day.

The Japs attacked Pearl Harbor to prevent the US fleet from interfering in their plans to attack the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong. That same day, the Japs attacked all of those locations.

In the first wave at Pearl, the Japs hit American airfields at Hickham Field, Wheeler Field, Ford Island, Kanoehe Naval Air Station, Bellows Field, and Ewa Marine Corps Station. The Americans were caught sleeping on Sunday morning and the Japs seized air superiority in the first minutes of the attack.

Naval Marshal General (Admiral) Isorokyu Yamamoto is alleged to have said, “I feel all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

Son of a bitch was right.

Two important things happened thereafter. The first was that President Roosevelt addressed the American Congress.

The second is that the Greatest Generation dropped their plows, picked up their rifles, and beat the crap out of the Germans and Japs. The Japanese surrender took place on the USS Missouri.

It is important that we never forget what happened at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, that we remember who we are — the nation (with our Allies) who defeated evil. This is who America is. We are a bulwark against unbridled evil.

God bless America.

But, hey, what the Hell do I really know anyway? I’m just a Big Red Car. 

 

3 thoughts on “Pearl Harbor Day – “A Date Which Will Live In Infamy””

  1. Pearl Harbor? We should have seen it coming and nipped it in the bud.

    When we refused to print money and, thus, let the Great Depression continue, on and on, in the US and around the world, we helped cause WWII.

    Finally, after 12 years when people started shooting at us, we printed the money and got out of the Depression in 90 days flat. We could have done that in 1929 and nipped all in the bud. We were dumb.

    We should have seen Japan coming. They built, what, a 70,000+ ton battleship, the Yamato, or some such, about 1 1/2 times as heavy as the US Missouri, and we didn’t see that coming? And they had a second one, the Musashi we didn’t see coming, either? What they did with naval air we didn’t see coming? How they were short on oil, coal, iron, rubber, and rice?

    When the Japanese navy and army were ready for their massive invasion of East Asia and the attack on Pearl Harbor, we didn’t see all that coming?

    When our code breakers in DC saw the Japanese looking like they were about to attack, we worked hard to ignore the brilliantly obtained, powerful, valuable info. Bummer.

    When the US, maybe General Marshall, sent a warning, nicely in time, to Pearl Harbor, apparently he didn’t bother to be sure to get an acknowledgment back that the message had been received. Gee, we do that trillions of times a day now with TCP/IP. And he didn’t call on the phone to give an even earlier warning and notification that the message was on the way. Bummer.

    Heck, supposedly at Pearl Harbor we had radar that saw the Japanese attack planes coming and didn’t believe it. We could have gotten our ships under steam, our anti-aircraft ready to shoot, and our planes in the air and gotten our aircraft carriers already at sea attacking the six Japanese carriers as they were nearly defenseless with nearly all their planes over Pearl.

    Thank you, thank you, thank you Commander Rochefort: You DID see the Japanese coming in the Coral Sea and then Midway, and, thus, we stopped them at the Coral Sea and had one of the greatest naval victories of all time at Midway. If at Midway we could have gotten our fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo planes coordinated, we might also have saved the Yorktown.

    We didn’t see Hitler coming? Clearly one thing Hitler wanted was oil. He tried to get that from North Africa moving east. Then he tried from western Russia moving south. We didn’t see that coming and nip it in the bud?

    Crash of 2000? We blew it blowing the bubble and then not doing enough when it burst.

    For the crash of 2008, we needed to see that coming. Once it happened, we needed to see the 8+ year Great Recession coming and nip it in the bud by printing the money and keeping the economy going. The 8+ years of our sick economy was darned expensive.

    We should have seen imported cheap products from Mexico and China coming, seen 90+ million US workers out of the labor force coming, and nipped all of those disasters in the bud.

    Yup, in some important ways, on getting an economy going, China beat us. Bummer. We don’t have to put up with that.

    We had plenty of information about Obozo long before he was elected and should have seen him coming.

    What we need now is not as simple as 77 or 87 years ago. Now we need to get the info, sit down, listen up, pay attention, get smart, and do the right things, not decades, years, or months late but fairly soon.

    We finally got rid of Obozo and his efforts to put the K-12 boys and girls in the same toilets and showers, flood the US with social problems, weaken the US military, make and leave the US economy sick, bow to the leader of China, insult England and Israel, shoot our energy industry in the gut, let our manufacturing industries die, keep us from defeating ISIS and the Taliban, and encourage radical Islam. He was out to hurt the US every way he could get away with and is still at it. We should have seen him coming.

    Somehow there is a huge, powerful coalition pushing hard, as a war, sometimes violent, to continue Obozo’s efforts to wreck the US. Big leaders in the effort are CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, Nasty Nancy, Chucky “Tears” Schumer, and nearly all the Democrat party. We need to see what is going on and expose and correct at some crucial places.

    Thankfully Trump let the US DoD defeat ISIS and get on with the Taliban. Trump has the Saudis starting to be responsible. On North Korea, he has China slowly helping and is doing a lot more otherwise. He’s getting the economy moving again and making progress on trade negotiations and immigration. He’s rolling back big parts of the Obozo sabotage.

    For the Obozo, media sabotage, the US media is being exposed for their fake news, losing their credibility, and starting to turn around.

    Obozo and Hillary are gone and on the way to being forgotten. Nasty Nancy and Chucky “Tears” Schumer are looking useless and on the way to big losses next November.

    Yes, W tried to respond to 9/11, nip more in the bud in Iraq and Akrapistan, but W was astoundingly weak between the ears even when sober. The US blood and treasure he threw at Iraq and Akrapistan were from brain-dead work. W was and is just too darned weak between the ears. Apparently !Jeb is even worse. We just must have better brains or will waste much more in blood and treasure. Apparently the Bush family is an example of the The Great American Story — rags to rags in three generations.

    Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you President Trump.

    So, Al Baghdadi, here’s someone I want you to meet. They call him “Mad Dog” Mattis. He’s in part, let’s say, a high speed, bad situation turn around expert. Al, let me give you a hint: If you can round up some funds in, say, a Swiss bank and find a calm island way out of the way, you might want to consider that for a long vacation. You can take a hint, right?

    Uh, Ding Song Dung Dong, a.k.a. “Little Rocket Boy,” in Ping Pong Yang, did I mention Mattis? You, too, might find such an island. Don’t wait to long, now, y’hear?

    Raúl, sorry ’bout your brother and the pinch penny Ruskis and Chinese. Yes, the news is slow to come to Havana, but for some months now Obozo’s gone. Time for you to have a reality check.

    Nancy, Chucky, here’s a reality check for both of you: Broadly, smarts are REALLY important. Dumb dumb de dumb dumb is usually awful quite soon and at best doesn’t work for long. A little more specifically, results count. And with results, there are two biggies, the economy and national security. Or, as has often been put, say, by political scientists, peace and prosperity. Having to send US blood and treasure overseas is a bummer. Doing that with bad results or a silly goal is really bad, historically bad, long term, unforgivably bad bummer. Along with good results, words to explain are good. Otherwise words don’t count for much. Neither do tears.

    Finally, Nancy, Chucky, put away your worn out deck, especially your top two cards, your race card and your gender card. They don’t work anymore.

    For your socialistic side, with 90+ million US citizens out of the labor force, we definitely do need a social safety net. But that safety net is mostly from huge mistakes in the past back at least to the LBJ-Nixon disaster in Viet Nam.

    With more automation, we stand to put a lot more people out of work. So, sure, such automation is deflationary. How to solve deflation? Easiest thing in the world — just print money. We may have to print a lot of money to get those people back to work.

    Smoking funny stuff, joining hands, and singing Kumbayah about the glories of socialism no longer count for much; what we really want is prosperity, that is, a working economy.

    Nancy, Chucky, time for you to stop your civil war on Trump and the US, get the info, sit down, listen up, get smart, and start working for your constituents and the US. Real soon, now, y’hear?

    Hopefully now we are nearly all starting to get the info, sit down, listen up, pay attention, get smart, and do the right things right along or fairly soon including nipping problems in the bud.

  2. One mistake people make is that American men willingly jumped up and joined the military. They went grudgingly. David Kennedy talks about this in his book researching the Roosevelt years from 1932-1944. Some American men did volunteer, but they had to institute a draft.

Comments are closed.