Let’s hope the MSM gives today as much coverage as the Hiroshima bombing anniversary. (Yeah, I know, I know.)
A long but good read is “Long Day’s Journey Into War” by Stanley Weintraub. He took events of that day from all over the world, hour-by-hour right, then the day after, and as a nice payback, a few survival stories from those at Hiroshima.
As you read the unfolding events, 20-20 hindsight makes it clear (you want to yell out “LOOK, DAMMIT! THEY’RE COMING!) that we were going to be hit, although you can see why our mindset blinded us into thinking it would be Malaya and the Philippines.
As a sidebar, you can’t help but wonder if Somebody Upstairs wasn’t tweaking the dials to make this event happen no matter how many omens there were. In a perverse way, if we had to suffer this attack, it was the best of bad luck. Given that the attack was inevitable, consider:
1) If the embassay Japs had translated the message in time, we would have been informed of the attack before it happened and the “Sneak Attack” slogan would have been nullified and perhaps the country wouldn’t have been as outraged and unified.
2) They sank our ships in shallow water. Within six months, with the exception of two, all battleships were raised and ended up modernized and taking part in the war. Had the fleet been at the alternative anchorage it would have been in much deeper water and harder to salvage.
3) Had we been alerted “just in time”, the fleet would have gotten out and been in REALLY deep water, and most probabably overwhelmed and sunk (think Prince of Wales and Hood), precluding any salvage attempts.
A terrible day no matter how you slice it though, and it does call for a moment of silence and thanks. Yamamoto’s apocryphal comment that they had “awakened a giant and filled him with a terrible resolve” was another way of saying “Don’t p!$$ off the Americans.” Would that the world today still had that fear.
Interesting info. I still believe that FDR and some of the brass had many warnings of the impending attack. The American people did not want us involved in the European war and Roosevelt did while feigning the opposite. He cut off oil and metal supplies to Japan to start the inevitable ball rolling. By allowing the Japanese attack, our entering both the European and Pacific theaters was ensured and a nation was galvanized. FDR was a socialist snake in oh so many ways.