Any other FReepers have relatives on board USS Arizona? My cousin Jesse Silvey, MM2C, still on watch in the engine room.
67 Years Ago. And I still remember a great deal of what went down that day. I was five years old,going on six.
Pretty hard to forget that Sunday Morning.
And I know there are fewer,and fewer of us who do remember.
The colors will be at Half Staff come Sun Up tomorrow.
Rest In Peace bump.
In this Dec. 7, 1941 file photo, the battleship USS Arizona belches smoke as it topples over into the sea during a Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. With an eye on the immediate aftermath of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, thousands of World War II veterans and other observers are expected on Sunday, Dec. 7, 2008 to commemorate the 67th anniversary of the devastating Japanese military raid.
Bump
日本＊ピング＊ (kono risuto ni hairitai ka detai wo shirasete kudasai : let me know if you want on or off this list)
Salute to all who served, so many who died, in Pearl Harbor and now somehow, our most bitter enemies are friends.
Pearl Harbor just killed so many others in the Philippines...Midway, so many other places, God Bless the men dying now at about 2,000 a day.
JAPAN DECLARED WAR ON AMERICA
Flags at half-staff for Pearl Harbor Day
From today’s USS Intrepid association newsletter ...
“Only hysteria entertains the idea that . . . Japan contemplates war upon us.” John Dulles, U.S. diplomat and later Secretary of State
“The Hawaiian Islands are over-protected; the entire Japanese fleet and Air Force could not seriously threaten Oahu.” Capt. Wm. Pulleston, former Chief of US Naval Intelligence
“No matter what happens, the U.S. Navy is not going to be caught napping.” SecNav Frank Knox, December 4, 1941
The 7 December 1941 Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor was one of the great defining moments in history. A single carefully-planned and well-executed stroke removed the United States Navy’s battleship force as a possible threat to the Japanese Empire’s southward expansion. America, unprepared and now considerably weakened, was abruptly brought into the Second World War as a full combatant.
Eighteen months earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had transferred the United States Fleet to Pearl Harbor as a presumed deterrent to Japanese aggression. The Japanese military, deeply engaged in the seemingly endless war it had started against China in mid-1937, badly needed oil and other raw materials. Commercial access to these was gradually curtailed as the conquests continued. In July 1941 the Western powers effectively halted trade with Japan. From then on, as the desperate Japanese schemed to seize the oil and mineral-rich East Indies and Southeast Asia, a Pacific war was virtually inevitable.
By late November 1941, with peace negotiations clearly approaching an end, informed U.S. officials (and they were well-informed, they believed, through an ability to read Japan’s diplomatic codes) fully expected a Japanese attack into the Indies, Malaya and probably the Philippines. Completely unanticipated was the prospect that Japan would attack east, as well.
The U.S. Fleet’s Pearl Harbor base was reachable by an aircraft carrier force, and the Japanese Navy secretly sent one across the Pacific with greater aerial striking power than had ever been seen on the World’s oceans. Its planes hit just before 8 AM on 7 December. Within a short time five of eight battleships at Pearl Harbor were sunk or sinking, with the rest damaged. Several other ships and most Hawaii-based combat planes were also knocked out and over 2400 Americans were dead. Soon after, Japanese planes eliminated much of the American air force in the Philippines, and a Japanese Army was ashore in Malaya.
These great Japanese successes, achieved without prior diplomatic formalities, shocked and enraged the previously divided American people into a level of purposeful unity hardly seen before or since. For the next five months, until the Battle of the Coral Sea in early May, Japan’s far-reaching offensives proceeded untroubled by fruitful opposition. American and Allied morale suffered accordingly. Under normal political circumstances, an accommodation might have been considered.
However, the memory of the “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor fueled a determination to fight on. Once the Battle of Midway in early June 1942 had eliminated much of Japan’s striking power, that same memory stoked a relentless war to reverse her conquests and remove her, and her German and Italian allies, as future threats to World peace.
This is what brought my Dad into the War, he was first sent to Camp Van Dorn Mississippi for basic training, then shipped out to the Pacific to join thousands of other GIs in the island hopping operations that would eventually see the Japs forced back to the home islands, and then introduced to Mr. Atom in August ‘45.
My Dad has no doubt been looking up his old buddies after going to be with the Lord 2 years ago next month, I’m always wishing he were still with us, but glad he isn’t alive to see the 0bamanation about to take place in our Country.
God Bless All of our Brave Veterans, those who came back, and those who paid the ultimate price, and did not.
Born 20 years to the day afterward. Maybe I was destined to be a Navy man.
1941: Japanese planes bomb Pearl Harbor
BBC | BBC
Posted on 12/07/2008 7:21:06 AM PST by Dubya
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2144439/posts
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Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. |
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