78 years ago today

Via MOTUS

"This is no drill!"

At The American Spectator, Geoffrey Norman writes about Pearl Harbor, where 2,403 soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, coast guardsmen and civilians were killed that day 77 years ago. Lest we ever forget...

The Japanese believed that they had won a splendid and complete victory at Pearl Harbor. They had achieved utter surprise and they had broken the backbone of the United States Navy which, without battleships, could not challenge the Japanese for control of the Pacific.

So, its leaders believed, that for many months, even years, Japan could consolidate the empire it had seized — or soon would, as in the case of the Philippines — and be secure against any challenge by sea.

However, in war, it sometimes seems there is nothing so uncertain as certainty.

...At one point in the months after Pearl Harbor and Midway, the U.S. Navy was down to one operational carrier in the Pacific. At the end of the war, less than four years later, it had over one hundred. We could build them faster than they would ever be able to sink them.

...Pearl Harbor is synonymous with surprise in war and, perhaps, the most successful — not to say audacious — surprise attack since that Greek stunt with the wooden horse. An example of overwhelming defeat, however temporary, as a result of surprise. Something to which America seems especially vulnerable.

The U.S. was surprised in Korea, first when North Koreans attacked, and then when the Chinese came in.

Surprised in the Cold War when the Berlin Wall went up

Surprised in Vietnam by the Tet Offensive.

Surprised when Iraq invaded Kuwait.

Surprised by the attacks of 9/11.

The attack of December 7th, however, is the sovereign surprise attack, catching the U.S. unprepared and even unbelieving. Which is summed up by the words that went out over the radio, once the bombs and torpedoes were exploding.

“Air raid, Pearl Harbor.”

And then.

“This is no drill.”

Complete surprise is when you can’t really believe it is happening.

And at Pearl Harbor, at first, they couldn’t.

It remains a day to remember.

Read more here.

Did you know that Japan came back to Pearl Harbor to try again in 1942?

Soldiers examine a wrecked Japanese Kawanishi H8K near Makin, Gilbert Islands in November 1943. Two similar planes were used in a bombing raid on Oahu, Hawaii, on March 4, 1942.
COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES

At Stars and Stripes, Wyatt Olson writes,

The Japanese surprise air attack of Dec. 7, 1941, on Hawaii was a staggering military triumph that decimated the Pacific Fleet’s battleships in Pearl Harbor and wiped out most of Oahu’s air defenses.

Three months later, the Japanese Imperial Navy sought to repeat a surprise bombing raid on the island using its newest long-range aircraft, the “flying boat” Kawanishi H8K.

While the two H8Ks successfully flew the 4,800-mile roundtrip from the Marshall Islands to Hawaii, the March 4, 1942, bombing raid was a tactical flop.

But its greatest failure was strategic, tipping the Japanese navy’s hand to U.S. military leaders who leveraged the intelligence to achieve victory in the Battle of Midway three months later.

Read more here.

Remembering the unspeakable horror

hat tip American Digest

When telephone operators had power

hat tip American Digest

When the media was biased in favor of America!

hat tip American Digest

Remembering Pearl Harbor and World War II

Historian Craig Shirley, author of December 1941: 31 Days that Changed America and Saved the World, joined SiriusXM host Matt Boyle on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

“Everything changes in America,” he said. “We stop announcing ship movements and troop movements. We get used to blackouts. We get used to roadblocks. Japanese nationals begin to be rounded up. All reserves are canceled. Everybody’s to go back into their uniform, which they’d been wearing civvies most of the time. Gas rationing starts to take hold quickly, food rationing, sugar rationing, coffee rationing. Scrap metal drives, paper drives, rubber drives all take place very, very quickly after December 7th, and the nation is transformed within a matter of days and weeks after December 7th.”

“The arsenal of democracy is such that within three weeks of December 7th, Ford Motor Company, along with Fisher Auto Body and Goodyear Tire, stops producing cars – which by the way, Washington told people are complaining about Trump manipulating businesses. FDR manipulated and directed every business in America for four years,” he observed. “Washington told Detroit, ‘You are no longer to build new cars,’ and Detroit said okay. So Detroit starts churning out fabricated B-24 and B-25 bombers made out of the parts of new cars that were going to be made.”

...Shirley said it was interesting to recall that “Churchill had been lobbying FDR for months” to support Britain, which he accurately presented as the “last line of defense against Nazism,” but “there was no will in this country for getting involved in another European war after World War I.”

“Even after the attack, there’s no linkage whatsoever between the attack at Pearl Harbor and our getting into the European war. The reason we get into the European war is four days after the attack, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini declare war on the United States because of the Tripartite Pact with Japan, which was a mutual defense agreement,” he pointed out. “So, therefore, we have to respond, so we declare war on Germany and Italy. But there’s no evidence whatsoever that would have gotten involved in the European war after Pearl Harbor, until Hitler and Italy declare war on the United States.”

“The Japanese soldier fought tenaciously and to the very death because they actually preferred death to being taken hostage or being taken prisoner, so it was a long slog over all these tiny atolls and islands, over three, four thousand miles across the Pacific, to invade them and to eradicate them. Guadalcanal was the tail of a bloody, bloody conflict which took months, and many, many American lives were lost,” he said.

“And we haven’t even mentioned the wounded,” Shirley added. “We lost in World War II something like 275,000 men, I believe, but it was well over a million wounded men [who] lost limbs, lost arms, lost their eyesight, lost their hearing – in some way, shape, or form were somehow badly damaged by the war effort. The casualties were exceedingly high in some instances, like Anzio in Europe.”

Read more here.