Remember Pearl Harbor!

[jmoore]

Does the infamy still live?

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[browningautorifle]

Even up here in Canada. My father was in the whole war, from '39 to '45. I think of these guys every day. When Pearl Harbour day comes every yeay and I mention it, many people give me a blank stare. BUT.. there are those of us who remember. I couldn't imagine anything more useless than dying in my rack in the lowest mess deck of the Arizona. There unable to deal with the coward that did me.

[jon_norstog]

Even up here in Canada. My father was in the whole war, from '39 to '45.... I couldn't imagine anything more useless than dying in my rack in the lowest mess deck of the Arizona. There unable to deal with the coward that did me.

Well, that's the difference between a sailor ANd a soldier. At sea, it's the ship that fights, not the man. Down in the engine room, you just do your job and stay at your post until you get blown, burned or flooded away from it.

Yeah, I feel for those guys too. Drowned like rats.

There was one ship that got up steam and ran out to meet the enemy - the CGC Taney. She was a brand-new ship, with a pair of 5"-51. Plus whatever was in the small arms locker. Steamed right out and ... the enemy was nowhere in sight.

The Taney was the last Pearl Harbor veteran ship in commission when she was decomissioned in 1986. She tied up to the same Govt. Island pier as my ships, the CGC Dexter, Barataria, and finally the Rush.

The guy who wrote "Flags of Our Fathers" (turns out his father was one of the Iwo Jima flag-raisers) published an editorial in the NY Times the other day. He says that TR's private correspondence shows that he at least tilted toward the Japanese and may have been in collusion with them when he famously mediated the Russo-Japanese conflict. And that the resulting ascent of Japan as a far east power set them, and us, on the course to Pearl Harbor.

There is something to it. The defeat of the Russians led the command generation of 1940 to assume that it would all be that easy ...

jn