On this day, a few years ago:
Not that we’re still angry about it, or anything — or else Toyota wouldn’t still be the top-selling automotive brand in the United States.
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On this day, a few years ago:
Not that we’re still angry about it, or anything — or else Toyota wouldn’t still be the top-selling automotive brand in the United States.
Comments are closed.
the price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Today is a reminder that it is possible to admire, and even to love, a nation while despising and seeking to destroy its goverment. Let’s just hope that no one confuses Donald Trump with Douglas Macarthur.
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Including Trump.
I was stationed in Hawaii for a total of 12 years during my 38-year career. The first tour, I briefly lived on Ford Island (before the bridge was built), in pre-WWII housing (in officers’ quarters that had a small bedroom for your aide). Some of the damage to buildings was left from Dec 7 was left as a reminder (same at Hickam Air Base). My wife and I used to take early morning walks around Ford Island and it was too easy to imagine what that Sunday morning would have been like, moments before the Japanese fighters and bombers came over the Ewa Plain.
On my second tour, I lived on McGrew Point, directly across the harbor from the USS Utah memorial. I went to dozens of retirements and promotions on the USS Arizona Memorial and the USS Missouri. Had I had the opportunity to have a Navy retirement, I would have loved to have it at one of those sites.
If you get a chance to go to Hawaii, don’t miss the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (Punchbowl). It’s right up there with Normandy and Meuse-Argonne as one of the most solemn grounds in US military history.
My older brother served in VietNam in 1968 with a grizzled old Sgt who was at Hickam field on 12/7/41. Only 27 years after the attack. Its creeping up on the same amount of time since 9/11. Amazing how time flies. But here is the main point. The post 9/11 generation knows NOTHING of either event. Orwells memory hole really does exist. The schools teach nothing of these. The popular culture ignores it. The parents are ignorant dolts. The movie Idiocracy is becoming reality.
Japan did that – and a lot of even worse things (e.g. Bataan death march, other abuse of PoWs, various gratuitous massacres). So we beat the living crap out of Japan – sank their navy, killed millions of their troops, burned down their cities, blasted them with atomic bombs.
They gave up – submitted. We hanged a bunch of war criminals. Then we said “Enough”.
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, “Do [we] not destroy [our] enemies when [we] make them [our] friends?”
Shoulda hung Hirohito too.
Bad tactics. The war was won. Killing the figurehead that made the nation governable would have been a mistake.
Redundancy alert, I think I’ve posted this here before.
Today is one of the days I fire up some incense for my great-uncle Satoru. After his big brother (my grandfather) was rounded up & “relocated” under the provisions of Executive Order 9066, Uncle Sat slipped the feds and enlisted in the 442nd RCT. He was 17. I’ve seen pics of him at that age. He looked like he was 15 or 16; he can’t have fooled anyone. He returned from Europe minus his left leg.
I was close to him as a kid, and he NEVER discussed the war. After he died, we mobilized a caravan of pickups to move Aunty Shizu into a condo. I grabbed a cardboard box from the master bedroom and it broke open. Out spilled Uncle Sat’s war memorabilia, including his Silver Star and Purple Heart. Aunty Shizu walked in on me and said “you’ve found the lucky charms!” She explained Uncle Sat felt that displaying his decorations would have been “vulgar.” He saw them as tokens of his stupendous luck, and reminders of his brothers who never returned. Aunty Shizu called them lucky charms, a private endearment between the two of them. Except for their daughter, I am the first member of the family to have ever seen them after the war.
祝福 to all those who’ve volunteered to be the pointy end of the spear. You’re better than me, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.
Remember, were Pearl Harbour to happen today it would be reported by the MSM as “suspected mass shooting in Hawaii, president Biden blames lax gun control, blames congress and the supreme court. John Kerry angry at CO2 emissions from Japanese aircraft”.
The day FDR betrayed the Navy, made them a sitting target, all in order to get us into that European war over the objections of the isolationists.
This is a myth. Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill wanted war in the Pacific, which would be a costly distraction from the war against Nazi Germany. This is clear from their private correspondence, in which Churchill praised Roosevelt’s policies as the best way to deter Japan from starting anything.
Nor did Roosevelt interfere in any way with the Pacific Fleet’s preparations for a possible war. On 27 November, the CNO sent an explicit “war warning” to CinCPac and CinCAF. The forces in Hawaii went on full alert, with additional patrols and defensive positions continually manned. Reinforcements were sent to Wake and Midway. However, after eight days of nothing happening, they “stood down” for the weekend to catch up on maintenance and resume training.
That no carriers were in Pearl Harbor on 7 December was pure luck: ENTERPRISE was due back on 6 December, but was delayed by a storm.
Various cranks and even one formerly reputable historian have claimed there was A Secret Plot by Roosevelt, but all these claims have been refuted by uncontestable evidence.