Another one of those dates we should never, never, never forget.
Even if your knowledge of the awful event only comes from Hollywood movies, the sights and sounds reinforce the Hell that was “A date which will live in infamy”.
Had their never been a Second Wave of fighters and bombers swarming like angry bees—but way less effective because all the smoke from dying battlewagons now obscured the fleet--and even if the First Wave broke off the attack ten minutes into it, about half the personnel damage had been done.
The Arizona had already become a tomb for 1,177 of her crew.
UPDATE: 7:30 PM
So amazingly the People’s Republic of Amherst, unlike last year (or the previous twenty or so) actually remembered to bring the town flag to half-staff. Not so for the blue blood private colleges like Smith, or Amherst College and even our public flagship Umass (although they remembered last year but maybe those budget cuts axed the flag protocol person).
Or even the town of Hadley.
Another reason we will never forget December 7, it's Larry's Bird's birthday.
ReplyDeleteYou may be more right than you realize about UMass. Not being a weekday nor a state holiday, there likely wasn't anyone on duty with the key to unlock the flag lanyards.
ReplyDeleteAll campus flag lanyards (not just the Hagus ones) have to be locked ever since the yahoos pulled down the US flag circa Cellucci and ran up a red banner in its place (Memorial Hall) and then Chancellor Scott responded by disciplining the folks who hadn't locked the flagpole. Not the perps who did it, but the janitors....
Gotta love UMAss...
false flag operation, our leaders knew they were coming, and let them....so we could get into the war
ReplyDeleteYeah, and President Bush--an old drinking buddy of Osama-- orchestrated 9/11 (being an oilman he would know how to set the thermite charges that brought down the Towers)
ReplyDeleteRoosevelt, a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, LOVED that fleet.
But, in both cass, they SHOULD have known. What a difference a lousy five minutes would have made.
The Arizona would have filled the sky with lead and that lucky SOB who landed the "golden BB" would have been obliterated.
Of course on 9/11, even if those two F-15's from Otis Air Base had enough advanced notice they probably would not have taken out either of the commercial jets over
metropolitan New York.
"Yeah, and President Bush--an old drinking buddy of Osama-- orchestrated 9/11 (being an oilman he would know how to set the thermite charges that brought down the Towers)"
ReplyDeletelarry, i am not sure if that was sarcasm....but if it is not, then it is refreshing to hear someone else admit our own people conspired, with cheney at the helm.
It was sarcasm.
ReplyDeletebeing oilmen they could buy whatever, and whomever they needed...including thermite.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.apfn.org/apfn/pearl_harbor.htm
ReplyDeletePearl Harbor was a wake up call on emerging technologies—specifically air power. On the morning of December 7 the United States government still believed the rule of the Battlewagon—and the bigger they were the more invincible.
ReplyDeleteColonel Billy Mitchell had tried to awaken the Powers That Be after WW1 to the awesome capability of a coordinated air attack and even demonstrated it by sinking ex German battleship, Ostfriesland in 1921.
Mitchell was dismissed by the Old World Order and wrote in a 1924 report that “some fine Sunday morning” the Japanese would mount a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines using air power.
Thomas Kuhn in “Structures of Scientific Revolution” points out that only after the folks who came up under one theory die off is another one embraced.
Roosevelt wanted us in the War alright, but he would NEVER have sacrificed what everybody at the time thought was our best weapon to WIN that war—the 7’th Fleet.
My understanding is that there were three big mistakes made.
ReplyDeleteFirst, everything had to be funneled through peacetime bureaucracy so that the folk who saw the planes coming in could neither verify directly that they were the expected friendlies or tip off Pearl as to the situation.
Second, it would have taken more than 5 minutes to prepare to shoot down the Japanese. First, what did they have for ADA at the time, if anything? Second, they probably were on shore power with the boilers cold and was shore power connected to the weapon systems in peacetime? I doubt it. And third, almost the entire crew was either on the beach with a girl, in church, or badly hung over and asleep below. This was Sunday morning in peacetime.
And third, had any battleship EVER been sunk EVER by ANY enemy before this? It hadn't happened, people didn't think that it could happen -- and for it to happen would need the 2000 lb shells from the 16 inch guns (which, ironically, is what the Japanese were dropping in modified form).
So too with the WTC. While only built to withstand an empty 707, the biggest plane at the time and in response to the crash into the Empire State Building, THE BUILDING WORKED. It absorbed the impact and remained standing.
The problem was the fireproofing on the steel. While it had been designed in the '60s for asbestos, upper floors in the impact area were covered instead with a brittle porcelan that broke off.
High rise buildings had caught fire before, but the sprinklers had always kept the steel cool enough not to soften. It hadn't happened before. Even in the third world, where safety standards are iffy and fires have killed in high rise buildings, none has ever imploded before.
It hadn't happened before. In either case.