A quiet Sunday morning…you’re listening to the radio, maybe getting ready for church, and you woke up in a world where your biggest worry was the oil leak in your car. And by the end of that same day the nation is marching to war and no one’s lives are untouched. Imagine what that must have been like…you woke up to orange juice and eggs and went to bed with a global war. The lesson there is that your whole life can change in just a moment. So..we prepare.
Headed there in February for my yearly visit home. Always visit Joint Base PH/HAFB (used to be stationed there). Most of the pre-war buildings there still have bullet and battle damage all over them. Carefully preserved as a silent reminder.
“Never let this happen again”…
Regards
Day Of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor
Well researched book. FDR viciously threw the commanders at pearl to the wolves to cover his own crime of not letting our troops have warning, and that isn’t even taking into consideration all the lives he sacrificed. FDR was not a good man.
We decided to make the day memorable , my wife and I got married on Pearl Harbor Day.
FDR was a Socialist jerk. No he was not a nice man. He prolonged a Depression that should have been over by 1934. He and his buddy Harry Hopkins hired thousands of CPUSA members and gave them government jobs, some with high level security clearances. So yeah Tail gunner Joie was right.
We were reading the Japanese Purple Code,the diplomatic code they used nearly in real time. And we broke JN25 the Japanese naval code in early 1941.
All across the Pacific our forces should have been on what today would be DEFCON 3. Instead thery were told to go on as usual. Even when the forward installations were begging for guidance. They were intercepting an increased level of Japanese radio traffic and Japanese subs were known to be in the vicinity.
Even with all that Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short were court martialed for deriliction of duty. Years after the war the convictions were overturned and their pay and rank were reinstated. Strangely Doug McArthur who was in Command in the Philippines followed exactly the same course as Kimmel and Short and he was commended and promoted.
In summation Roosevelt knew that the attack was coming. Knew roughly when and should have went to a higher state of readiness.
Politically it was better anbd easier to sell a sneak attack to the country hence fitting in with Roosevelt’s plan to enter the war in Europe. The Japanese gave him his excuse. It wouldn’t have went over quite as good if he told the country, “yeah I knew the attack was coming but didn’t get ready cause it didn’t fit in with my plans”. FDR wanted the war in Europe and most of our war effort was concentrated there. The South Pacific was fought basically on a shoe string. I had uncle in the PTO and in the ETO. One fought with Patton’s third Army. The other was with the Marines on Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. As full disclosure I am a distance cousin of Franklin Roosevelt and after much study and research I have come to despise the man.
When 30% of Millenials don’t even know what the Holocaust was, it is good to remember on December 7 things that so many Americans have forgotten.
Found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_of_war#Empire_of_Japan:
“Prisoners of war from China, the United States, Australia, Britain, Canada, India, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the Philippines held by the Japanese armed forces were subject to murder, beatings, summary punishment, brutal treatment, forced labour, medical experimentation, starvation rations, poor medical treatment and cannibalism.[52] The most notorious use of forced labour was in the construction of the Burma–Thailand Death Railway. After 20 March 1943, the Imperial Navy was under orders to execute all prisoners taken at sea.[53]
,,, The 27,465 United States Army and United States Army Air Forces POWs in the Pacific Theater had a 40.4% death rate.[56] The War Ministry in Tokyo issued an order at the end of the war to kill all surviving POWs.[57]”
“Germany and Italy generally treated prisoners from the British Commonwealth, France, the US, and other western Allies in accordance with the Geneva Convention, which had been signed by these countries.[65] Consequently, western Allied officers were not usually made to work and some personnel of lower rank were usually compensated, or not required to work either. The main complaints of western Allied prisoners of war in German POW camps—especially during the last two years of the war—concerned shortages of food.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_of_war
Hollywood, or at least some parts of it, will never end its efforts to make Holocaust movies (apparently, not many Millenials are watching, however). Yet, only rarely does it make movies about Japanese atrocities. Why? Why not hold up for scrutiny the barbaric Japanese who caused the death rate of our prisoners at 40.4% (and 14 million Chinese deaths).
The death rate of Germans in US prisoner of war camps after the war ended was believed to be as high as 1% https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/germans-died-american-pow-camps.html That was about the same as the death rate of Americans in German prison camps during the war, and no doubt many of those Americans came down in bad shape from aircraft that were shot down. https://time.com/3334677/pow-world-war-two-usa-japan/
My father was a young sailor on the U.S.S. Yorktown (not the one sunk at Midway, but the one commissioned shortly after that and which now resides in Charleston Harbor as a naval aviation museum). He can be seen closing a hatch behind Cornelius “Smokey” Stover, the Yorktown’s Chief of Air Ops in the WWII documentary “The Fighting Lady.” This documentary can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5JbXRDOP60 Stover was shot down during the first raid on Truk. He waived to pilots who flew directly over him in the water, but who could not help him. The VHS video of “The Fighting Lady” used to be sold in the Yorktown’s gift shop. At the end of the documentary, the head of the Yorktown Association said that Stover was believed to be among 7 American pilots who were beheaded by the Japs that night.
Perhaps 15 years ago, I met a friend after work at an English pub here in town. We started talking about WWII. At one point, I said, “Harry Truman was a trigger-happy sonofabitch!” My friend was somewhat startled. He asked me what I meant. I said that Old Harry had two atomic bombs and he used them. I said, “No-o-o! He couldn’t wait until he had a dozen of them.”
My friend laughed. He then pointed to his friend (who was white) sitting beside him and said, “His wife’s grandfather commanded the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands.” Instead of being embarrassed at what some might consider to be a faux pas, I roared with laughter. I could not have cared less about what his friend thought about my remark.
If you think that my callous attitude was inappropriate, in case you didn’t know, Japan was planning a biological warfare attack on Southern California in September 1945. That little surrender ceremony on the U.S.S. Missouri interrupted the effort. Check out this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cherry_Blossoms_at_Night
One thing that bothered me at the end of an excellent movie, the current “Midway” that is playing in theaters, was the fact that it was dedicated to both Americans and Japanese forces who fought in the battle. As it is now, I shed no tears for the Japs. We should have killed even more of them.
To prove the point. Harry Truman should have hit every major city in Japan with atomic bombs. This would have told the entire world you mess with the US you die like the rest.
I think the cold war might not have happened. At least the brush fire wars in Korea and Vietnam masy have not happened. Lots of things might have been different.