Posted on 06/09/2017 8:17:45 PM PDT by rey
The day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, an 18-year-old sailor named Fred “Earl” Smith, quite a baseball player, took the infield for two intra-Navy games.
Smith and his shipmates from the battleship USS Tennessee took on the team from the Arizona, then from the West Virginia.
The first game was close, the future Santa Rosa Junior College instructor recalled in an interview in 2015, until he hit a home run.
“It won the game against the Arizona,” Smith told Hawaii Public Radio. “The West Virginia, we stomped ‘em.”
The Navy baseball players partied that Saturday night in Honolulu. Early the next morning, torrents of Japanese bombs, torpedoes and bullets turned Pearl Harbor awash in death and fire.
For the following 76 years, it pained Smith to read the names of the sailors who died that day.
“Half of the West Virginia’s ballplayers were killed and all the Arizona’s ballplayers were killed,” he said two years ago.
The career Navy man and former 26-year resident of Sonoma County died May 21 at his retirement home in Rio Vista. He was 94.
(Excerpt) Read more at pressdemocrat.com ...
Unimaginable for the USS West Virginia to play the USS Arizona on Saturday and the next day all the Arizona ball team and half the West Virginia ball team are gone.
As an avid baseball player myself, this really struck home for me.
I can imagine that situation very easily. It would haunt you. Pulling those guys out of the drink would too.
Sounds like he handled it professionally. It would take a pretty strong constitution to do so.
I look back to the fifties, when I was yet a young child, and the years after that, when America was an amazing place with very high ideals and morals second to none, for the most part.
We overcame the moral problems we had. Hopefully we can do it again.
As a nation we tend to come together in times of grave national circumstances. As tough as things are right now here at home, I think we would do it again.
For the remembrance of this guy, and all the others who fought to give us this nation, we must.
Rest in peace hero. God bless you for your service to our nation. I’m sorry you had to live long enough to see what has become of it but many of us are trying to keep it strong and stable. Rest easy sir!
Didn’t know ya Fred- But it’s because of men and women like you that enjoy the freedoms I enjoy today and for that I am truly grateful- It is a true honor to live in a country forged by the bravery and dedication that folks like you gave to us all-
Thank You
RIP Sailor, your watch is over.
RIP.
I salute this remarkable man. Then there is this:
Unable to summon the backbone to defeat the current enemy, the West is stuck constantly reliving that glorious time when they whipped the Nazis.”
Ann Coulter
I have grown so tired of seeing the 90 year old gloating over the defeat of Nazi Germany. So tired. I have so much respect for the soldiers who stormed the beaches at Normandy, but look what they came home to. Look at what their kids created.
If any Freeper invents a time machine, use it to go back in time to the eve of the invasion and show those soldiers a film of what our country is today
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