Monday, December 7, 2015

A Date That Has Lived In Infamy



USS Arizona 12/7/41


USS Arizona today


“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (12/7/41)


“With confidence in our armed forces - with the unbounded determination of our people - we will gain the inevitable triumph - so help us God.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (12/8/41)


Total killed at Pearl Harbor 2,402


Attack begins:  7:48 a.m.


USS Arizona explodes: 8:10 a.m.


USS Arizona:  1,177 killed in action, the highest loss of live in US naval history. 





9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Always remember.

Anonymous said...

yeah and some sixty five odd years later americans run around in Toyotas and Hondas and we have a great relationship with Japan. I hope the same holds for the extremists who were responsible for much less than the pearl harbor carnage.

Jackie M'Vemba said...

1:28. I'm not sure whether you intended an insult or not, but at least we know you cannot perform basic math.

Anonymous said...

1941 - 2015 = 65 odd years. Solid logic

Anonymous said...

Thanks for remembering Larry. Asked my kids tonight, not one mention of it in the High School.

Anonymous said...

Well some of us adopted American children and not Chinese. Real American Larry oh and do you have them enrolled in the Chinese Immersion school. Real American Larry, keep flapping that plastic flag on rainy days and oh Larry I give you a heartfelt thank you for never serving.

Anonymous said...

What does China have to do with the Japanese artack? God bless all who remember this infamous attack and the lives lost throughout the war.

Anonymous said...

Peace is a many splendid thing,always commendable,but do they really teach at the Leverett "Peace Pagoda" more than Buddism suffered defeat -thats pretty uber gauche and self serving, can being that clueless be peacefull ?Pretty exitable. !!!

Dr. Ed said...

Because facts matter, I need to mention that Japan did not intend for the attack to be a surprise, they intended to give the US about 30 minutes warning but they miscalculated the time difference between Hawaii & DC and sent their ambassador over an hour later than they had intended to.

Isoroku Yamamoto was very much upset about the fact that the "well this means war" message hadn't been delivered before the first bombs fell, as was intended. Of course, he didn't want to go to war anyway.

And notwithstanding the loss of American life, Pearl Harbor really was a defeat for the Japanese because it literally did awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve. The draft had only passed by one vote and FDR won re-election in 1940 with a promise that "I will not send your boys off to fight a foreign war."

While the battleships had been relevant a decade earlier, the airplane had made them obsolete (as Pearl Harbor showed). In the Pacific theater, all the battleships would ever do is serve as gun platforms to bombard shore positions, as they would do as late as Vietnam. All the aircraft carriers just happened to be at sea on maneuvers that Sunday morning, funny how those things happen, isn't it...