Posted on 12/07/2023 11:36:41 AM PST by j.havenfarm
Good morning all from Pearl Harbor, where the 82d anniversary ceremony has just concluded. It’s a beautiful morning here, just as it was that terrible Sunday when the attack began at 7:55 a.m. A moving ceremony, with all branches of the services represented, a fly by with missing man formation, and the guided missile destroyer USS Decatur passed in review and rendered honors.
Six Pearl Harbor survivors were in attendance and honored this morning. Unfortunately, my friend Lou Conter, last survivor of the USS Arizona, aged 102, was not able to attend, though his grand nephew, Ray Hower, delivered stirring keynote remarks. As I have here every year since it was published, I offer my son’s 2017 Eagle Scout project video biography of Mr Conter. https://youtu.be/T_L0kWTqPiA?si=4qdJwr14szVy8y2W
Remember Pearl Harbor and the servicemen and civilians who lost their lives 81 years ago today.
Sorry guys. The link in the title does work, but not the one in the body. I’ll try again
https://youtu.be/T_L0kWTqPiA?si=4qdJwr14szVy8y2W
I’ll try to find it but I was just reading a story about how Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor in advance and did nothing, wanting a justification to getting us into war ... don’t know if it was conspiracy theory or not but the story seemed legit.
Grandfather came right off the boat from “the old country” and enlisted in the Navy. He was on the hospital ship USS Solace During the attack. Needless to say he never talked about what he saw.
Most vets I’ve met that were in heavy combat like that didn’t talk about it much, the trauma was indescribably hard. Friend of my FIL was a scout sniper/tunnel rat in Viet Nam, I got to know him well over the years and he would only occasionally talk to me about what he saw (both of us being Marines helped that somewhat).
Did Briben show up yet to explain how he survived Dec 7, 1941?
I started working in 1970 during a time replacing the greatest generation. THEY all said that they believed Roosevelt knew about the attack. I was quite surprised by this.
The article I was referencing was about the book, “Day Of Deceit” by Robert Stinnet. Apparently he went through the information available in the National Archives through a FOIA request, something in the neighborhood of 200,000 different documents.
Today the democrats would support Japan.
No, he didn’t. The theory ignores the actual world situation in December 1941. FDR did not need Pearl Harbor for war with Japan. Japan was going bring war to Wake, Guam, and the Philippine Islands with its anticipated attacks on the Southern Resource Area (Malaya and the Dutch East Indies).
Due to the declining situation in the Western Pacific, the US was withdrawing its Naval forces from China. The bulk of the 4th Marines were moved to the Philippines by the end of November, the Yangtze River Patrol was discontinued, and most of its boats moved to the Philippines the first week of December. The final American forces left in China were due out on December 10th.
The US was sending anything it could spare to reenforce the PI and Admiral Hart had moved the surface combatants of the Asiatic Fleet to ports in the DEI for safety and potential joint operation with the Dutch and British.
Almost everything pointed to attacks on the Philippines, and points South, and very little pointed at Hawaii.
bkmk
Thanks!
Survive? Heck, he’d probably claim he shot down a couple/three zeroes with his shotgun.
Billy Mitchell
I’ve done a lot of study of Pearl Harbor. I don’t be believe he knew. They knew the Japs would attack somewhere but no one dreamed it would be Pearl. Plus FDR dearly loved the Navy. I don’t believe he would have left the fleet in port. In a way it’s fortunate that the fleet was in Pearl or those battleships might have been sunk at sea and left unsalvageable.
This “conspiracy” is on the level of the fake moon landing nutjob conspiracy.
Agree!
Everyone was convinced it would be the Philippines.
It was in their line of advance, made the most sense. To go east of Guam and attack was too much a risk, that’s why they did it. Also, the brass had convinced themselves that Pearl Harbor was too shallow for aerial torpedoes. However Japan modified aerial torpedoes to be able to swim through the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor. The torpedoes were known as the Thunder Fish. They added small wood fins to the tail cone, which allowed the Thunder fish to have a shorter dive distance and allowed it not to hit the ocean floor.
Yes, the possibility of an attack was there. But the Japanese primary target was the oil fields in the Dutch East Indies.
Yes
The Brits had attacked the Italian Fleet at Taranto, a harbor as shallow as Pearl, earlier in the war. I guess the USNavy brass were too busy trying to screw each other’s wives than to pay attention to the use of aerial torpedoes in a war actively being waged.
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