A Day we seem to have forgotten...

In an odd twist of fate, since Uncle John couldn't get along with many people except his brothers and nephews,

he tended to adopt old retired police German Shepards, two of which went through storm doors to attack black post men.

The 2nd one stood his ground, the dog stopped, my uncle, in a sleeveless tee shirt, tatoos exposed went after the post man

too.  There was a lot of shouting until the post man too was in a sleeveless shirt showing John his Red Ball Express tats.

They became best friends until the mail man was almost pushed aside by his cousin, a veteran of the 761st.

They watched hundreds of 76er games together after that, all the while complaining about the disappearing beer. /s

No need for political commentary, thanks

the greatest generation of my family are gone too. their 4+ years of personal sacrifice, blood and death condensed to chapters in history books or television documentaries. history seems to fade without those around that witnessed it.

Mine, also. My Great Uncle Carl was at the Battle of the Bulge and almost lost his toes due to frostbite. Grampap was behind the battles picking up weapons so civilians and released Jewish prisoners wouldn't start their own battles.

Many great stories from the 2 of them that I didn't pay much attention to. I regret that and I miss them very much.

I salute all who served during that war.

My father had trench foot til the day he died.

infamy = 80 years

apparently...

It is a very important day in history never to be forgotten.

Sorry to hear you were sick. Nothing is more miserable than stomach issues. 

And thank you for reminding all of us of this important day. Shame that no one else here remembered. I have to say that my hubby did.

I think America generally forgot about Pearl Harbor years ago. 

Popular culture in the 21st century is very "now" oriented. 

There are still many good books and movies about the start of America's participation in WW2 though. 

The Glory And The Dream by William Manchester

Confronting one another across the Pacific, each nation had long pondered the strategy of a surprise raid on the base. The U.S. naval maneuvers around Pearl in 1932 have been noted. Japan’s interest in them arose from the fact that beginning in 1931, every member of each graduating class in Japan’s naval academy had been required to answer one question: “How would you execute a surprise assault on Pearl Harbor?”

In January 1941 Ambassador Grew alerted Washington to the possibilities of a sneak raid on Pearl. (In his diary he wrote, “There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japanese, in case of a break with the United States, are planning to go all out in a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor. I rather guess the boys in Hawaii are not precisely asleep.”) The Peruvian ambassador in Tokyo heard the same talk, and obligingly sent it to Washington via Grew. The American military establishment was not perturbed. Men in striped pants! Peruvians! What would they know about war? But other Americans had seen the future clearly. In July 1941 Richmond Kelly Turner, then chief of the Navy War Plans Division, had named Hawaii as the “prob- able” target of any Japanese offensive, and he also predicted that the attack would be made by aircraft. Navy Secretary Knox had written Stimson, “Hostilities would be initiated by a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.”

There were warning flags everywhere. An intercepted Tokyo message on December 3, four days before the raid, had inquired whether there were “any observation balloons above Pearl Harbor,” and on December 5 FBI agents in Honolulu had told the high command at Pearl that the Japanese consulate there was burning its confidential papers. Admiral Kimmel himself—his memory to the contrary—had warned his staff that “Declaration of war might be preceded by a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.” What happened? Four years later, with the war won and Congress investigating the catastrophe over which Kimmel and Short had presided, the question was still unanswered. That the commanding officers had failed was evident enough, but why? Part of the answer may lie in the fact that Americans, for complex reasons that included racial chauvinism, had never taken the Japanese people seriously. They were such funny little men, with their thick spectacles, buck teeth, and bowlegs. Everyone knew America might go to war with them, but no one believed it. It was both inevitable and out of the question.

On August 11 Time reported that “the Navy is fairly well off with its… own defenses”; on November 24 it declared that official Washington felt the chances “were nine-to-ten that Japan and the U.S. would go to war”; and in its December 8 issue, which was on the presses when the base on Oahu was going up in flames, Time reflected the general confidence: “From Ran- goon to Honolulu, every man was at battle stations.” Every Japanese was at battle stations, and troop formations were poised to strike at Manila, Hong Kong, Malaya. Months of planning and rehearsal had gone into this coordinated effort. Secrecy had been perfect; no word of the offensive, not even a rumor, had reached foreign agents. And yet, in the end, the Japs bungled it. They had outfoxed themselves. The crux of their diplomatic maneuver had been to declare war on the United States and then bomb Pearl Harbor, before the dazed Americans could respond. In the 1970s, after a quarter-century of undeclared hostilities, this may seem too fine a point, but in 1941 most great powers did not make war until the declaration had been made. To do otherwise was considered treacherous. The schedule drawn up in Tokyo required the two Japanese envoys in Washington to telephone Hull at 10:20 A.M. on December 7 and ask for a 1 P.M. appointment. Tokyo was cabling a fourteen-point message to its Washington embassy, the last part of which contained a carefully worded end of diplomatic relations—in effect a war declaration. Twenty minutes after Hull had the document, the carrier-borne war- planes would swarm over Pearl Harbor. At 10:20 A.M. Nomura obediently arranged the appointment—and then made a dreadful discovery. Yesterday, when he left his embassy, his decoders had been working on the long document. Now, to his horror, he learned that the decoders had quit work early Saturday and would need two or three hours to finish. It was nearly 11 A.M. They were fighting the clock, and they couldn’t beat it. At 12:32 P.M. Eastern Standard Time (7:02 A.M. in Hawaii) a radar operator on Oahu reported the imminent arrival of a large force of aircraft. His superior officer told him to forget it, that the blips were probably U.S. planes coming from the mainland.

At 1:20 P.M. Washington time the attack on Pearl Harbor began. At 1:48 P.M. the Navy’s traffic chief was called to the Washington-Honolulu circuit by an alert to stand by for an urgent message from the Honolulu operator. At 1:50 it came in: NPM 1516 Z ØF2 183Ø ØF3 ØF4 Ø2FØ 0 FROM: CINCPAC ACTION: CINCLANT CINCAF OPNAV AIR RAID ON PEARL HARBOR THIS IS NOT A DRILL Nomura and Kurusu reached the old State, War and Navy Building at 2:05 P.M., and they were a sorry sight. For three hours they had been struggling with codes and hunting and pecking on typewriters. The message was marred by typographical errors, but they hadn’t had time for another draft. As they entered the building, Hul- l’s phone rang. It was the President. He quickly gave his Secretary of State the few scraps of information which had come in, confirming what they already knew from Signal Corps decoding. Meet Nomura and Kurusu, Roosevelt ordered Hull; don’t mention Pearl Harbor, and then icily bow them out. The Japanese envoys were ushered into his office at 2:21 P.M. Nomura held out the translation and said apologetically, “I was instructed to hand this reply to you at 1:00 P.M.” His voice trembling with anger, Hull said, “Why should it be handed to me at 1 P.M.?” “I do not know why,” said Nomura.¹ Glancing at the translation, Hull said bitterly, “I must say that in all my conversations with you during the last nine months I have never uttered one word of un- truth…. In all my fifty years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions—infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any govern- ment on this planet was capable of uttering them.” Nomura moved to speak; Hull dismissed him with a curt nod toward the door. Moments later Associated Press tickers chimed in the country’s newsrooms: FLASH WASHINGTON—WHITE HOUSE SAYS JAPS ATTACK PEARL HARBOR 222PES Curiously, only one network interrupted a program for the start of the war. Len Sterling, staff announcer for the Mutual Broadcasting System, broke into a profes- sional football game between the Dodgers and the Giants at the Polo Grounds.

NBC and CBS continued with a Sammy Kaye serenade and a program of studio music; both networks had scheduled news broadcasts at 2:30, and they decided to let their listeners wait until then. Meanwhile, more was coming in: BULLETIN WASHINGTON, DEC. 7 (AP) PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT SAID IN A STATEMENT TODAY THAT THE JAPANESE HAD ATTACKED PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII, FROM THE AIR. THE ATTACK OF THE JAPANESE ALSO WAS MADE ON ALL NAVAL AND MILITARY “ACTIVITIES” ON THE ISLAND OF OAHU. THE PRESIDENT’S BRIEF STATEMENT WAS READ TO REPORTERS BY STEPHEN EARLY, PRESIDENTIAL SECRETARY. NO FURTHER DETAILS WERE GIVEN IMMEDIATELY. AT THE TIME OF THE WHITE HOUSE ANNOUNCEMENT, THE JAPANESE AMBAS- SADORS KICHISABURO NOMURA AND SABURO KURUSU, WERE AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT. FLASH WASHINGTON—SECOND AIR ATTACK REPORTED ON ARMY AND NAVY BASES IN MANILA. The second flash was a rumor; the Philippines were to have a day’s grace— though when the Jap Zeros did arrive, they found that MacArthur, like Short, had huddled his planes together, and in the middle of Clark Field they were gutted just as easily. The radio networks, having canceled all scheduled programs, were now putting everything they could get on the air, including some canards. Millions of Americans first learned of the attack when they turned on their radios to hear the CBS broadcast of the New York Philharmonic concert at 3 P.M., and one of them was Rear Admiral Chester Nimitz. He was waiting for his set to warm up; at the announcer’s first phrase (“Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor today”), Nimitz was up and away—to replace, it subsequently developed, Pearl’s unfortunate Admiral Kimmel. Simultaneously a telephone rang at Fort Sam Houston, arousing Brigadier General Eisenhower. His wife heard him say, “Yes? When? I’ll be right down,” and then he was running for the door, dressing as he went and calling over his shoulder to her that he was on his way to headquarters and didn’t know when he would be back. Inevitably, some reactions were odd. Len Sterling, who had interrupted WHN’s account of the football game at the Polo Grounds, was being hounded by calls from infuriated fans who wanted to know what was happening on the field. The same was true in Phoenix, where people were phoning the Arizona Republic to say irritably, “Have you got any score on the game between the Chicago Bears and the Cardi- nals? Aren’t you getting anything besides that war stuff?”

In Denver a KFEL religious program was canceled; a caller wanted to know whether the station considered war news more important than the gospel. A girl in Palm Springs said, “Everybody knew it was going to happen, so why spoil a perfectly good Sunday afternoon worrying about it?” In New Jersey an elderly man cackled, “Ha! You got me on that Martian stunt; I had a hunch you’d try it again.” A reporter asked Senator Nye his reaction. The senator, who perhaps could hear the bell of political oblivion tolling in the dis- tance, growled, “Sounds terribly fishy to me.” But Senator Wheeler caught the national mood: “The only thing to do now is to lick hell out of them.” So divided had the country been before this Sunday that Pres- ident Roosevelt, at a White House lunch the week before, said he doubted he could get a declaration of war out of Congress if the Japs invaded the Philippines. Now the country was united as it had never been. The sneak attack, the presence of two Japa- nese ambassadors in Washington pretending to negotiate peace, and an old dis- trust of what some still called the Yellow Peril combined to transform the war into a crusade against treacherous Orientals. *** “No!” the President had gasped when the Secretary of the Navy telephoned him the news.

War is Hell.

The sneak attack by the Japanese caused Americans to unite against them.  Thanks to families like yours, we managed to prevail and win WWII.  I am grateful that I didn't have to learn Japanese (or German).     

I was at the Arizona memorial in 2011 and was fortunate to spend over an hour with four survivors of Pearl Harbor. 

Robert G. Kinzler

Alfred Benjamin Kame'eiamoku Rodrigues

Sterling R. Cale

Herb Weatherwax

I was able to ask them questions about their own experience that day and their service for the remainder of the war. Two of them ended up fighting in Europe and two fought in the Pacific. 

It was truly an honor to meet and talk to these men, part of the greatest generation. An experience that I will not soon forget.

Standing on the memorial to the Arizona and seeing the oil still bubbling to the surface after all these years and seeing the names chiseled into the marble stops you in your tracks. And later standing on the deck of the Missouri and seeing the spot on the deck the Japanese surrendered again takes your breath away. Some of the bloodiest fighting took place in the Pacific. From Tarawa to Okinawa hero's all.

One of my fathers in law was the biggest racist I ever met as far as blacks, no reason given, and Japanese, too eager to tell anyone that would listen,

For whatever reason, he thought he was being picked on at Guadalcanal and assigned to graves/recovery/identification.

He did too good a job and was assigned to the same at Iwo Jima.

He had no brakes about discussing what happened to a USMC captured by the Japs.

World War 2 in the Pacific was to some extent a race war.  The Japanese society at the time very much believed in Japanese racial superiority, and so did many of the  Americans believe in the racial superiority of their own group. 

I was reading a book about ground combat on a Pacific island one time and was stunned when I came upon a chapter that described atrocities, including cannibalism, that Japanese soldiers inflicted on wounded and captured Americans. 

atrocities happen on both sides. it's part of every war.

I'm glad that when I was in Hawaii around half a century ago I visited the Pearl Harbouir memorial site to pay my respects.

I'm telling you we were probably not only in Hawaii at nearly the same time but probbaly San Francisco too.

How weird is that?

I was in Hawaii in early December of 1972.  It was my last gasp at being single.  I got married at the end of the year.  Spent a little time on Oahu, more time than that on Kauai, and then on the big Island.

I was there the last couple of days of November 1972 and the first week of December on Oahu and Molokai

where an uncle had a pig farm along several acres of beachfront property. The ocean was a fence, so to speak.

My odd cousin who was a cable tv installer, lived on his boat in the Honolulu yacht harbor and would sail at night to

Moloki just using the stars.  

You were one of the last couple of gays?

Sorry couldn't resist.  Haha

I remember the oil still dribbling to the surface around the Arizona 

and remembered Dad's cousin Ed floating in hundreds of burning gallons of it.

circa 1973

I guess I must have been there a year before you were.

The other side of the family had better 'luck' during the war.

4 men from the same family, 2 brothers and 2 cousins all called Mick all landed on Gold or Sword on DDAY,

walked the beaches until they found each other, took some Brownie pictures of each other's foxholes in the sand,

Then pooled all of their government issued cigarettes and chocolate to my Uncle Mic who headed straight inland.

He returned the next morning with two bottles of wine and a dozen eggs in his helmet.

They were all engineers maintaining the floating docks or operating cranes in Cherborg(?)

They spent the next 2 years shipping cash and "collectables" back to Mic's Mom.

When they all returned to the States they bought their little tracts and built their 1200 sg ft homes and started 

an excavation company which MY cousins are now handing over to THEIR children.

CMTSU

My cousin Monroe was with the 501st PIR of the 101st Airborne that jumped that fateful night at Normandy and lost his life at Bastogne on December 24th, 1944. One of three brothers that fought in WWII. My uncle, their father never recovered from the loss of one son and the serious wounding of another. In a business in Northern MN, there is a bronze plaque next to a photo of Monroe that reads, ''A Rendezvous with Destiny''

The only relative I had that served then was a Great Uncle. He was a pilot during the war.

This is probably in bad taste but I thought it was funny.

There are twenty in a score so there must be 79 in an infamy. Didn’t see a word.