A date which will live in infamy

[953 nut 55,250]

[SylvanLakeWH 25,571]

[D_Mac 8,619]

I have a collection of old newspapers. Any of you remember newspapers??? I used to get the newspaper everyday and read it front to back. Now I can not even remember when I have seen one last, let alone read one. In my collection I have several WW2 papers. One is the bombing of Peal Harbor. Notice the dead only estimated at 350, when in reality over 2,300 lost their lives that day. My have times changed.

[pfrederi 17,739]

It is already being forgotten

 

of course now it is that FDR baited the **** by embargoing the oil..or that moving the fleet from San Diego to Hawaii caused it..

 

Got to love revisionist history..

[pfrederi 17,739]

Interesting you cannot use the short version of Japanese any more...

 

so sad

 

[wh500special 2,184]

3 hours ago, pfrederi said:

It is already being forgotten

 

of course now it is that FDR baited the **** by embargoing the oil..or that moving the fleet from San Diego to Hawaii caused it..

 

Got to love revisionist history..

 

3 hours ago, pfrederi said:

Interesting you cannot use the short version of Japanese any more...

 

so sad

 

I disagree.  This isn’t sad. 
 

The term you used has for decades rarely been used in a non derogatory sense.  dropping it from our common lexicon isn’t a bad thing since for so long it’s been a charged term meant to separate, discriminate, and denigrate.  I suppose it occasionally might just be an abbreviation for the Japanese people, but in my lifetime it’s rarely ever used innocently. 

there’s no upside to offending people. 

 

A little digging into its etymology will show. 
 

Steve

[953 nut 55,250]

It has been a few years since I last posted this.

Excerpts from "Reflections on Pearl Harbor" by Admiral Chester Nimitz.

Sunday, December 7th, 1941--Admiral Chester Nimitz was attending a concert in Washington D.C. He was paged and told there was a phone call for him. When he answered the phone, it was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the phone. He told Admiral Nimitz that he (Nimitz) would now be the Commander of the Pacific Fleet.

Admiral Nimitz flew to Hawaii to assume command of the Pacific Fleet. He landed at Pearl Harbor on Christmas Eve, 1941. There was such a spirit of despair, dejection and defeat you would have thought the Japanese had already won the war.

On Christmas Day, 1941, Adm. Nimitz was given a boat tour of the destruction wrought on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. Big sunken battleships and navy vessels cluttered the waters everywhere you looked.

As the tour boat returned to dock, the young helmsman of the boat asked, "Well Admiral, what do you think after seeing all this destruction?" Admiral Nimitz's reply shocked everyone within the sound of his voice.

Admiral Nimitz said, "The Japanese made three of the biggest mistakes an attack force could ever make, or God was taking care of America. Which do you think it was?"

Shocked and surprised, the young helmsman asked, "What do mean by saying the Japanese made the three biggest mistakes an attack force ever made?" Nimitz explained:

Mistake number one:
The Japanese attacked on Sunday morning. Nine out of every ten crewmen of those ships were ashore on leave.

If those same ships had been lured to sea and been sunk--we would have lost 38,000 men instead of 3,800.

Mistake number two:
When the Japanese saw all those battleships lined in a row, they got so carried away sinking those battleships, they never once bombed our dry docks opposite those ships. If they had destroyed our dry docks, we would have had to tow every one of those ships to America to be repaired.

As it is now, the ships are in shallow water and can be raised. One tug can pull them over to the dry docks, and we can have them repaired and at sea by the time we could have towed them to America. And I already have crews ashore anxious to man those ships.

Mistake number three;
Every drop of fuel in the Pacific theater of war is in top of the ground storage tanks five miles away over that hill. One attack plane could have strafed those tanks and destroyed our fuel supply. That's why I say the Japanese made three of the biggest mistakes an attack force could make, God was taking care of America.

 

Any way you look at it--Admiral Nimitz was able to see a silver lining in a situation and circumstance where everyone else saw only despair and defeatism.

President Roosevelt had chosen the right man for the right job. We desperately needed a leader that could see silver linings in the midst of the clouds of dejection, despair and defeat.

 

Our national motto is, IN GOD WE TRUST, he watched over us in 1941 and continues to do so today.


CONTINUE TO PRAY FOR OUR COUNTRY, now more than ever.