"A date which shall live in infamy"

nddons

Touchdown! Greaser!
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72 years ago today, we entered WWII. Prayers to all those who lost their lives on that day, and later.

By no means do I mean to disrespect this day, but:

8 years ago today, I became a private pilot. Fortunately, no lives were lost as a result of that.
 
You could say 72 years ago today a lot of men became pilots even if they didn't know it on this day. I salute those who answered the call.
 
Thing that always amazed me the most about Pearl Harbor is how freaking close the IJN came to getting the carriers (which was their objective). I mean, we're talking a matter of hours.
 
Thing that always amazed me the most about Pearl Harbor is how freaking close the IJN came to getting the carriers (which was their objective). I mean, we're talking a matter of hours.

It was not an accident. ;)

There is a theory that Roosevelt knew of the attack and let it happen to get us into WWII. The battleships were sacraficed due to obsolescence from the carrier strike force, and submarines. Before the war it was our foreign policy to be "isolationalist", remember WWI was fought just a few years before.

Granted, the bombing of Pearl Harbor was great food for conspiracy theorists before Kennedy was shot. ;)
 
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Thing that always amazed me the most about Pearl Harbor is how freaking close the IJN came to getting the carriers (which was their objective). I mean, we're talking a matter of hours.


I'm not following, the carriers for the most part weren't even close?

Enterprise was returning from wake 215 miles away

Lexington was 500 SE of Midway

Saratoga was in San Diego

Yorktown was in the Atlantic

Poor intelligence work by the Japanese, even Yamamoto discussed this with his staff post attack.

What am I missing?
 
I'm not following, the carriers for the most part weren't even close?

Enterprise was returning from wake 215 miles away
215nm is nothing. It is a half day's sail. As I recall, ENTERPRISE was scheduled to be pier side on the morning if the 8th if not late on the 7th.

What many folks aren't aware of is that aircraft from the air wing were engaged (and some shot down) by IJN aircraft as they were enroute to Ford Island that morning.
 
I'm not following, the carriers for the most part weren't even close?

Enterprise was returning from wake 215 miles away

Lexington was 500 SE of Midway

Saratoga was in San Diego

Yorktown was in the Atlantic

Poor intelligence work by the Japanese, even Yamamoto discussed this with his staff post attack.

What am I missing?

The conspiracy man, the conspiracy!!!
 
215nm is nothing. It is a half day's sail. As I recall, ENTERPRISE was scheduled to be pier side on the morning if the 8th if not late on the 7th.

What many folks aren't aware of is that aircraft from the air wing were engaged (and some shot down) by IJN aircraft as they were enroute to Ford Island that morning.

I know that the carriers could go about 32 knots. I just didn't know how fast the fleet moved in non-war/combat times with the speed limitations of the support ships. Were they moving close to 20 knots?

I have always been amazed that the Japanese attacked without the carriers. IMO wait until you are 100% sure that at least Enterprise and Lexington are in port. Especially since Yamamoto felt that there was no way to win a war with the U.S. even prior to the attack and that the best hope was to force a treaty.
 
Took this photo of the USS Arizona memorial, USS Missouri, and Ford Island on December 5th. You can see the oil still leaking from the Arizona.
 

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We did not get around to it yesterday, but Karen and I plan on watching "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" in the next few days.

$T2eC16R,!)UE9s3wCMZWBRqqO7ymLg~~60_35.JPG


What better way to commemorate Pearl Harbor than to remember the brave men who got at least a taste of retribution for that act.

Available on Amazon Prime streaming last time I looked.

Don't recall if I've seen the movie or not, but I did read the book, as early as elementary school, IIRC.
 
Watch it in the evening, with appetizer of fried mushrooms washed down with Pearl beer (if it's still available).
 
We did not get around to it yesterday, but Karen and I plan on watching "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" in the next few days.

$T2eC16R,!)UE9s3wCMZWBRqqO7ymLg~~60_35.JPG


What better way to commemorate Pearl Harbor than to remember the brave men who got at least a taste of retribution for that act.

Available on Amazon Prime streaming last time I looked.

Don't recall if I've seen the movie or not, but I did read the book, as early as elementary school, IIRC.

This is one of my favorites. It has some cheesy lines but is overall faithful to the book and history. It's a heck of alot better than that recent "Pearl Harbor" movie with Ben Affleck. I have a 1943 first edition of the book. Fun to read every so often.
 
Worst

War movie

EVER!!!!
Agreed.

I was stationed at Hickam AFB when they were filming it. I could see Ford Island across the channel from my house and watched formations of planes make repeated passes for the cameras. I also rode my bike over to Ford Island see the stuff on the ground. Pretty neat.

My daughter and her friends just had to see the movie on opening day in Honolulu. I braved the crowds and dropped them off at the theater. They were excited. When I picked them up, they were uniformly disappointed. My daughter said it was historically inaccurate, the flying scenes were cheesy, and it failed as a love story.
 
Some interesting historical tidbits that many aren't aware of...

FDR froze Japanese assets in the U.S. to stop them from being able to purchase U.S. petroleum to continue their rampage throughout Asia. The Japanese took this as a declaration of War long before the attack on Pearl, his carefully crafted speech where the first paragraph was designed to make sure America was seen as the victim of aggression, and the resulting declaration by Congress an hour later. We were already at War with Japan, after essentially stealing huge amounts of money from them, but the average Joe on the street didn't realize it.

The damage to the Pacific fleet and the speed with which Japan took every island except the Bataan peninsula in the Philippines and Hawaii, had the War department utterly terrified. Even during the infamous speech, no specifics on damage or casualties were really given, and all the American people were told for many years was the body count of just over 2000. The War department, probably rightly so, classified the damage assessment information about Pearl as being far too dangerous to publish. If published, the Japanese may have pushed even harder in the Pacific.

And the leadership had already decided the war in the Pacific had to wait on the war in Europe. We weren't prepared at all to even fight one war, let alone two. The Army still thought their cavalry horses from WWI were going to be useful. We at least showed up to the North Africa expedition with tanks instead of horses, but most of them were death traps when put up against the few German Tigers that made it to Tunisia.

The stories of Tiger tankers standing *outside* their tanks and firing them with ropes! taking out whole divisions of our early tanks without them even getting inside the tank! from ranges greater than our tanks could effectively fire, are horrifying if you think about them from the point of view of a farm kid sent to fight in a U.S. tank. Stories of infantry moving forward on open ground as 88mm shells flew by at chest height so close you could feel the concussion in the air of their passing you on the way to the tanks behind you (and the occasional individual soldier vaporizing in a cloud of blood and body parts if they just happened to be directly in the path of one of those shells) are incredible.

The follow on stories of "shell shock", or "war weariness" that today we know better as PTSD, where American soldiers would try to dig foxholes in their beds in hospitals, screaming that Jerry was coming, aren't really too surprising knowing the sad state of our gear early on.

Back in the Pacific, it's still my opinion that MacArthur leaving Corregador by PT boat with his family was one of the most cowardly things I've ever seen of a General. Granted, he and Ike knew no reinforcements were forthcoming for the Americans and Filipinos holding the Bataan peninsula and Ike felt he couldn't lose his most well-known General, but it was a coward's move nevertheless. Wiring from Australia that he "would be back" was just PR spin. He would, of course, but the men he left behind suffered through the Bataan Death March as a direct result of abandoning the Pacific theatre.

There was probably no way logistically to rescue the garrison on the Phillippines, but MacArthur sitting on his hands with 9 hours of warning before Pearl and not protecting his aircraft, certainly didn't help things. No one wanted to give away that we were eavesdropping on Japanese radio traffic.

Most of the history we hear and see today is of the latter half of the War. When we were finally up to speed and winning. We had our asses handed to us big time in the Pacific and Tunisia first. You don't hear nearly as much about that. If Rommel hadn't just completely shut down and retreated for no discernible reason, he'd have pushed Allied forces all the way back to Algiers.

But he was war weary also, and ill, having been waging war for far longer than we had at that point, and did similarly to his troops as MacArthur did, "accepting" the German high command's offer of a trip home to recuperate. He left, and knew the a German high command was wrong to try to hold as much ground as they were attempting to hold in North Africa, but was too tired or outranked to stop it.


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Some interesting historical tidbits that many aren't aware of...

FDR froze Japanese assets in the U.S. to stop them from being able to purchase U.S. petroleum to continue their rampage throughout Asia. The Japanese took this as a declaration of War long before the attack on Pearl, his carefully crafted speech where the first paragraph was designed to make sure America was seen as the victim of aggression, and the resulting declaration by Congress an hour later. We were already at War with Japan, after essentially stealing huge amounts of money from them, but the average Joe on the street didn't realize it.

Well if people want to redefine terminology, then anything goes.

Here's a clue, since freezing a countries assets doesn't require an act of congress, people might want to be careful about considering that as "a declaration of War."

Fact: prior to 7 December, the US was not at war with Japan.
 
Last time we were in Hawaii we visited the Pacific Aviation Museum. Well worth the trip to Pearl. Visiting the restoration hangar, there are still bullet holes in the glass from the infamous attack.
 
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