Attack On Pearl Harbor Quotes

I had a question. 'Why does the name Pearl Harbor sound so familiar?' The lieutenant colonel's eyes narrowed. 'Pearl Harbor is the most famous U.S. military base in the world,' he said crisply. 'It's the only place on U.S. soil that has been attacked in a wars, since the Revolutionary War.' None of this was ringing a bell, but you already know I'm totally uneducated. Gazzy leaned over to whisper, 'It was a movie with Ben Affleck.' Ah. Now I remembered.

When our ancestors were attacked at Pearl Harbor, they called it a day that would live in infamy. The day the Partials attacked us with the RM Virus will not live in anything, because there will be none of us left to remember it." -President David R. Cregan, March 21, 2065, in a press conference at the White House. Three hours later he hanged himself.

He [Ted Williams] was only a 23-year-old kid when he batted .406 in 1941, but then the season ended and our country came under attack at Pearl Harbor—and by 1943 he was a Marine fighter pilot serving overseas who cheated death on several documented occasions. He came back in 1946, and he won his first career MVP after hitting 38 home runs.

We Americans are used to viewing war from a distance—the privilege of living, as Chancellor Otto von Bismarck once said, with less powerful neighbors to the north and south, and nothing to the east and west but fish. Even the terrible attack on our own Pearl Harbor came thousands of miles away.

Pearl Harbor Address to the Nation Delivered on December 8, 1941 Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Senate, and of the House of Representatives: Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack. It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time, the Japanese government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace. The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu. Yesterday, the Japanese government also launched an attack against Malaya. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam. Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island. And this morning, the Japanese attacked Midway Island. Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation. As commander in chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense. But always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us. Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph -- so help us God. I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.

I remember the thrill that was mine when, in one of my first meetings, I led my first soul to Christ in America. And he was one of my own countrymen.

President Roosevelt provoked the Japanese to attack us at Pearl Harbor.

ONE OF THE STURDIEST PRECEPTS of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the offing. The months preceding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor offer a rare exception to this axiom. During 1941, in the wake of that outburst of gaudy hopefulness, the World’s Fair, a sizable portion of the citizens of New York City had the odd experience of feeling for the time in which they were living, at the very moment they were living in it, that strange blend of optimism and nostalgia which is the usual hallmark of the aetataureate delusion.

Presidents lie all the time. Really great presidents lie. Abraham Lincoln managed to end slavery in America partially by deception. (In an 1858 debate, he flatly insisted that he had no intention of abolishing slavery in states where it was already legal — he had to say this in order to slow the tide of secession.) Franklin Roosevelt lied about the U.S. position of neutrality until we entered World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor. (Though the public and Congress believed his public pledge of impartiality, he was already working in secret with Winston Churchill and selling arms to France.) Ronald Reagan lied about Iran-Contra so much that it now seems like he was honestly confused. Politically, the practice of lying is essential. By the time the Lewinsky story broke, Clinton had already lied about many, many things. (He’d openly lied about his level of commitment to gay rights during the ’92 campaign.) The presidency is not a job for an honest man. It’s way too complex. If honesty drove the electoral process, Jimmy Carter would have served two terms and the 2008 presidential race would have been a dead heat between Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich.

Honolulu’s police chief William Gabrielson and Lieutenant General Delos Emmons, the army commander in Hawaii, stating that there were no acts of sabotage preceding or during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Though distrust of the Japanese was widespread in the Navy, Sprague was among the first to appreciate exactly what the Japanese might do. In June 1928 the Lexington participated in a mock surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

The warships below were tossed up into the air like bathtub toys. The Japanese battleship Nagato, formerly the flagship of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the man responsible for planning the attack on Pearl Harbor, was thrown four hundred yards.

The attack on Pearl Harbor had been terrible and unexpected, sure, but it paled when compared with the bombings of Shanghai or the sacking of Nanjing - according to his father anyway. Henry, on the other hand, couldn’t even find Nanjing on a map.

In the wake of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York, described by some as “our new Pearl Harbor,” we saw an unfortunate readiness, on the part of many, to assume that all Americans of Middle Eastern background were suddenly suspect and should somehow be held accountable for these crimes. It was a hauntingly familiar rush to judgment. In the early months of 1942, this is what preceded the unlawful evacuation and internment of 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States entered into World War II to protect our way of life and to help liberate those who had fallen under the Axis occupation. The country rallied to produce one of the largest war efforts in history. Young men volunteered to join the Armed Forces, while others were drafted. Women went to work in factories and took military jobs. Everyone collected their used cooking grease and metals to be used for munitions. They rationed gas and groceries. Factories now were producing airplanes, weapons, and military vehicles. They all wanted to do their part. And they did, turning America into a war machine. The nation was in full support to help our boys win the war and come home quickly. Grandpa wanted to do his part too.

It is no longer taboo to say that President Roosevelt required Pearl Harbor to drag a war-weary American public into supporting another World War. Discussion of FDRʼs foreknowledge of the Japanese attack is not only the subject of books by respected historians, but of documentaries on cable television.

President Obama dropped the term 'war on terror', and rightly so. Terrorism is not an enemy but a type of warfare that may or may not be adopted by an enemy. Imagine if, after Pearl Harbor, an attack that relied on aircraft carriers, President Roosevelt had declared a global war on naval aviation. By focusing on terrorism instead of al Qaeda or radical Islam, Bush elevated a specific kind of assault to a position that shaped American global strategy, which left the United States strategically off-balance. Obama may have clarified the nomenclature, but he left in place a significant portion of the imbalance, which is an obsession with the threat of terrorist attacks. As we consider presidential options in the coming decade, it appears imperative that we clear up just how much of a threat terrorism actually presents and what that threat means for U.S. policy.

Pearl Harbor, the 9-11 attacks, and the COVID-19 pandemic are all classic examples of USA government failures.

The court exonerated Admiral Kimmel of all charges and laid the blame squarely on Washington. The Army Pearl Harbor Board also concluded that Washington had full foreknowledge of the attack.

Broadcast just two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, this episode provides ample evidence that everyone involved with Fibber McGee and Molly is behind the war effort, from Wilcox’s reading a telegram from Johnson’s Wax authorizing NBC to break in with any news bulletins to Harlow’s appeal to buy defense bonds at the close which leads into a stirring version of the first verse of a patriotic hymn sung by everyone in attendance.

At these proceedings, the attorneys for Kimmel and Short presented undeniable proof that Washington had complete foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack, but had withheld this information from the commanders in Hawaii.

He accelerated his courses as much as possible, to graduate sooner; he was able to do this not because he was smarter than the other Harvard boys (he was older, but not smarter, than most of them) but because he spent little time with friends. He had a pregnant wife and two babies; he hardly had time for friends. His only recreation, he said, was listening to professional baseball games on the radio. Just a few months after the World Series, Father listened to the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The first Japanese strike in the Pacific War was not against America at Pearl Harbor. It was against British Malaya. About 90mn before Pearl Harbor, some 5k Japanese troops successfully attacked a British force in Kota Bharu, in the Kelantan Sultanate.

All I propose is an attack that will paralyze the Americans, for perhaps six months. This attack is not about victory, about winning a war...It is about delaying them, keeping them back, damaging their military might and pride. -Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

The portly Italian chief never talked much. Though he had played the royal baby at the crossing-the-line ceremony, he was the oldest man on the ship at forty-three and had little in common with boys twenty and more years his junior. Serafini was an immigrant from the Old Country whose Navy service dated to World War I. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, he had left a well-paying job in the Philadelphia Navy Yard and reenlisted despite both exceeding the age limit and his status as father of two. Serafini felt that he owed a debt of gratitude to the United States.

The admiral was famously unflappable, but found the attack on Pearl Harbor a shattering experience. Spruance revealed this only to his wife and daughter, then waited anxiously for Admiral Chester Nimitz to take over as CincPac—Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet. After the obscenity at Pearl, America’s Pacific Fleet leadership was demoralized. Spruance sensed that Nimitz would inject some sorely needed fighting spirit, and he was right. Nimitz proved bold, aggressive, confident. Energized, the Pacific fleet began to sortie out and fight back. Spruance was elated.

At 1:23pm Zeros were approaching Pearl Harbor where it was 7:53am. At that moment the flight commander radioed Admiral Nagumo TORA, TORA, TORA@ The repeated code word, meaning "tiger," stood for 'We have succeeded in surprise attack'." Two minutes later torpedo bombers began diving on Battleship Row.

For many people, that war [WWII] is called the “good war” because it was fought against a regime guilty of unspeakable atrocities. But the Allies did not enter the war to save Jews from extermination. The United States entered the war after it was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor and, as a nation, we certainly did not do as much as we should have to save the Jewish population of Europe. The basic question is still with us: Is it right, justifiable, to intervene in a nation’s internal activities when those activities include genocide, ethnic cleansing, or some other demonstrable harm to a subset of its people?

Nothing could ever replace the treasure of America’s men and women killed or forever maimed by Japan’s attack, but Nimitz looked around Pearl Harbor and decided that it could have been much worse. On the list of physical casualties, there were three glaring omissions that would prove to be major strategic blunders on the part of the Japanese.

History is full of examples of generals done in by their own blind spots: from a willingness of the Persian fleet to sail into the Greek's trap in the Salamis straits; to the legions that marched into Arminius's ambush in the Teutoburg Forest; to the American warships and airplanes that were easy pickings for the Japanese attackers at Pearl harbor.

When Adolf Hitler heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he slapped his hands together in glee and exclaimed, “Now it is impossible to lose the war. We now have an ally, Japan, who has never been vanquished in three thousand years.” Germany and Japan were threatening the world with massive land armies. But Hitler and Hirohito had never taken the measure of the man in the White House. A former assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt had his own ideas about the shape and size of the military juggernaut he would wield. FDR’s military experts told him that only huge American ground forces could meet the threat. But Roosevelt turned aside their requests to conscript tens of millions of Americans to fight a traditional war. The Dutchman would have no part in the mass WWI-type carnage of American boys on European or Asian killing fields. Billy Mitchell was gone, but Roosevelt remembered his words. Now, as Japan and Germany invested in yesterday, FDR invested in tomorrow. He slashed his military planners’ dreams of a vast 35-million-man force by more than half. He shrunk the dollars available for battle in the first and second dimensions and put his money on the third. When the commander in chief called for the production of four thousand airplanes per month, his advisers wondered if he meant per year. After all, the U.S. had produced only eight hundred airplanes just two years earlier. FDR was quick to correct them. The

Doggie Rayl was a perfectionist, and a man lucky to be alive to make the trip to the North Pole. Rayl was a signalman aboard the battleship USS Arizona (BB-39) at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He was sleeping topside to escape the heat below when the Japanese attacked. The explosions blew him overboard, and he managed to scramble to another ship. That is how he survived the Arizona’s sinking.

Neoconservatives have written about “getting lucky” with a “Pearl Harbor event.” Michael Ledeen wrote for example in his 1999 book Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: “Of course, we can always get lucky. Stunning events from outside can providently awaken the enterprise from its growing torpor, and demonstrate the need for renewal, as the devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 so effectively aroused the United States from its soothing dreams of permanent neutrality….” Then the 9/11 attack aroused war fever against Muslims and Arabs in the Middle East. This is precisely the reason that “false flags” are popular tools for those who see war as noble and heroic in their effort to promote an agenda that is never noble but always self-serving. And there’s nothing heroic about chickenhawks, of which there are many.

Retrospectively, American statesmen realized the rashness of their oil embargo. As the later secretary of state Dean Acheson put it, America’s misreading of Japanese intentions was not of “what the Japanese government proposed to do in Asia, not of the hostility our embargo would excite, but of the incredibly high risks General Tojo would assume to accomplish his ends. No one in Washington realized that he and his regime regarded the conquest of Asia not as the accomplishment of an ambition but as the survival of a regime. It was a life-and-death matter to them.”146 Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was a partial success in the short term, and Japan went on to enjoy great tactical victories against America and Britain, but the conflict eventually led to its almost total destruction by 1945. Its wars in East Asia cost tens of millions of lives.

Economies can be rebuilt, armies can be repopulated, but once a nation’s pride is gone it can almost never be restored. The loss of a nation’s honor is something not even centuries can repair. The next president must love America. The next president must embody unequivocally everything that is good about this country going back to its founding. The next president must be the exact opposite of Barack Obama. He must be a man of high character and strong commitment to American values, because he will be facing problems and issues that no U.S. leader has had to face since the years leading up to World War II. In the late 1930s—only a few years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—our economy was still trying to recover from the Great Depression in the face of the policies of a big-government president, our military had been depleted, and our enemies were gathering strength and threatening war on many fronts.

When President Roosevelt suggested to Archibald MacLeish that radio be prodded to help celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, Corwin was given the job. It was an enormous undertaking, a 60-minute broadcast to air on the four national networks simultaneously. But We Hold These Truths was to have a special meaning, for the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor the week before, and the show arrived on an unprecedented wave of patriotism. It was estimated by Crossley, the national barometer of radio listenership, that 60 million people tuned in that night, Dec. 15, 1941. Corwin had arranged a stellar cast. James Stewart played the lead, “a citizen” who was the sounding board for the cascade of opinions, historical perspectives, and colloquialisms that flooded the hour. Also in the cast were Edward Arnold, Lionel Barrymore, Walter Brennan, Bob Burns, Walter Huston, Marjorie Main, Edward G. Robinson, Rudy Vallee, and Orson Welles. Bernard Herrmann conducted in Hollywood,

I was on one of my world 'walkabouts.' It had taken me once more through Hong Kong, to Japan, Australia, and then Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific [one of the places I grew up]. There I found the picture of 'the Father.' It was a real, gigantic Saltwater Crocodile (whose picture is now featured on page 1 of TEETH). From that moment, 'the Father' began to swim through the murky recesses of my mind. Imagine! I thought, men confronting the world’s largest reptile on its own turf! And what if they were stripped of their firearms, so they must face this force of nature with nothing but hand weapons and wits? We know that neither whales nor sharks hunt individual humans for weeks on end. But, Dear Reader, crocodiles do! They are intelligent predators that choose their victims and plot their attacks. So, lost on its river, how would our heroes escape a great hunter of the Father’s magnitude? And what if these modern men must also confront the headhunters and cannibals who truly roam New Guinea? What of tribal wars, the coming of Christianity and materialism (the phenomenon known as the 'Cargo Cult'), and the people’s introduction to 'civilization' in the form of world war? What of first contact between pristine tribal culture and the outside world? What about tribal clashes on a global scale—the hatred and enmity between America and Japan, from Pearl Harbor, to the only use in history of atomic weapons? And if the world could find peace at last, how about Johnny and Katsu?

Men of letters were not immune to the Pearl Harbor spell. One of the most distinguished poets of twentieth-century Japan, Saito Mokichi, fifty-nine at the time, recorded in his diary: “The red blood of my old age is now bursting with life! … Hawaii has been attacked!” The thirty-six-year-old novelist Ito Sei wrote in his journal: “A fine deed. The Japanese tactic wonderfully resembles the one employed in the Russo-Japanese War.” Indeed, that war started with Japan’s surprise attack on Russian ships in Port Arthur on February 8, 1904, two days before Japan’s formal declaration of war. Japan won that war. Even those Japanese who had previously disapproved of their country’s expansionism in Asia were excited by Japan’s war with the West. In an instant, the official claim, gradually adopted by the Japanese government over the preceding decade, of liberating Asia from Western encroachment gained legitimacy in their eyes. Until then, the innately self-contradictory nature of fighting an anti-imperialist war for Asia against fellow Asians in China had tormented them. Takeuchi Yoshimi, a thirty-one-year-old Sinologist, now said he and his friends had been mistaken in doubting their leaders’ true intentions:

Period: Mid-twentieth century Ruling power: United States Rising power: Japan Domain: Sea power and influence in the Asia-Pacific Outcome: World War II (1941–45) Imperial Japan, bolstered by decisive victories in the Sino- and Russo-Japanese wars and a growing sphere of influence that included Korea and Taiwan, became aggressively hegemonic in the twentieth century. As Japanese expansion, particularly into China, threatened the American-led “Open Door” order in the Pacific, the United States became increasingly hostile toward Japan in the 1930s. After the US sought to contain Japan by embargoing its raw material imports, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, drawing the hitherto reluctant Americans into World War II.

In a conversation at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta, he told us how, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the entire country and much of the world seemed to come together overnight. Since then, he wondered, has there been anything that could trigger a similar coalition of the righteous and committed? The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks did that initially, many would argue. But the reaction didn’t last long, muddled and dissipated as it was by military action that arguably had nothing to do with the attack or threat. An alien invasion, though, that threatened the entire planet and forced human beings to set aside their differences would do it, the Durants believed. “Infectious diseases turn out to be a surrogate for an alien invasion,” Bill declared. “It’s why we were able to do smallpox eradication in the midst of the Cold War. Both sides could see this was an important thing to do.” To take the alien invasion analogy one step further, we would first have to convince the public that extraterrestrials had, in fact, landed on earth. Look at climate change: The science is well established and yet a large percentage of the population refuses to believe it. The same holds true for infectious diseases. Our task is to convince world leaders, corporate heads, philanthropic organizations, and members of the media that the threat of pandemics and regional epidemics is real and will only continue to grow. Ignoring these threats until they blow up in our faces is not a strategy.

On September 11th 2001, bin Laden, al Qaeda, and his co-conspirators attacked the United States. During these attacks, suicide bombers struck the famous Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing nearly three thousand people on American soil.1 It was hailed as a second Pearl Harbor, except the kamikaze pilots came at the start of the war rather than the end. America would react much like it did after Pearl Harbor. War hysteria reared its ugly head as freedom vanilla replaced French vanilla in cafeterias in the style of Wilsonesque-nomenclature propaganda.2 Civil rights and natural rights would be openly assaulted by a government sworn to protect them in one of the longest wars in American history. Randolph Bourne’s decried jingoism would return to the sounds of trumpets blaring and the sight of flags waving. The familiar phrase “Remember the Lusitania,” which became “Remember Pearl Harbor,” became “Remember 9/11.” Anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment filled the country as America waxed hysterical, crying for “us” to “get those towelheads.

According to Eden’s personal secretary, Oliver Harvey, his master was ‘horrified’ by Churchill’s plan and tried to talk him out of it. He failed. In despair, he rang the US ambassador, John Winant, who, similarly taken aback, advised that such a visit would not be appropriate until the New Year at the earliest. Harvey too was appalled, noting, ‘I am aghast at the consequence of both [Churchill and Eden] being away at once. The British public will think quite rightly that they are mad.’ If Eden called off his Moscow mission, however, it would send the wrong message entirely to the Kremlin, since ‘it would be fatal to put off A.E.’s visit to Stalin to enable PM to visit Roosevelt. It would confirm all Stalin’s worst suspicions.’20 Eden persisted. He phoned the deputy prime minister, Clement Attlee, who agreed with him wholeheartedly and undertook to oppose the prime minister’s scheme at Cabinet. His objection had no effect: nothing would divert Churchill from his chosen course. When Cadogan spoke to him later that evening, to explain that Eden was ‘distressed’ at the idea of their both being out of the country at the same time, Churchill brushed him aside, saying, ‘That’s all right: that’ll work very well: I shall have Anthony where I want him.’21 Though he did not put it quite so bluntly when discussing this personally with Eden, Churchill left him in no doubt that ‘a complete understanding between Britain and the United States outweighed all else’.22 This conviction was reinforced by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and, according to the new CIGS, Brooke, the pressing need ‘to ensure that American help to this country does not dry up in consequence’.23 Eden’s opposition to Churchill’s visit had genuine diplomatic validity, but neither was he entirely disinterested, for, as Harvey put it, the prime ministerial trip would ‘take all the limelight off the Moscow visit’.24 The unfortunate Foreign Secretary was not only unwell but also disconsolate as HMS Kent set off into rising seas and darkening weather. The British party of Eden, Cadogan and Harvey, accompanied by Lieutenant General Sir Archibald Nye (the newly appointed Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff) and a phalanx of officials, set foot on Russian soil on 13 December. Their arrival gave Cadogan (who was not a seasoned

The BBC announcer’s voice changed. “The news,” he said, “has just been received that Japanese aircraft have raided Pearl Harbor, the American naval base in Hawaii. The announcement of the attack was made in a brief statement by President Roosevelt. Naval and military targets on the principal Hawaiian island of Oahu have also been attacked. No further details are yet available.” At first, there was confusion. “I was thoroughly startled,” Harriman said, “and I repeated the words, ‘The Japanese have raided Pearl Harbor.’ ” “No, no,” countered Churchill aide Tommy Thompson. “He said Pearl River.” U.S. ambassador John Winant, also present, glanced toward Churchill. “We looked at one another incredulously,” Winant wrote. Churchill, his depression suddenly lifted, slammed the top of the radio down and leapt to his feet. His on-duty private secretary, John Martin, entered the room, announcing that the Admiralty was on the phone. As Churchill headed for the door, he said, “We shall declare war on Japan.” Winant followed, perturbed. “Good God,” he said, “you can’t declare war on a radio announcement.” (Later Winant wrote, “There is nothing half-hearted or unpositive about Churchill—certainly not when he is on the move.”) Churchill stopped. His voice quiet, he said, “What shall I do?” Winant set off to call Roosevelt to learn more. “And I shall talk with him too,” Churchill said. Once Roosevelt was on the line, Winant told him that he had a friend with him who also wanted to speak. “You will know who it is, as soon as you hear his voice.

So Japan is allied with Germany and they’re like “Sweet the rest of the world already hates us let’s take their land!” So they start invading China and Malaysia and the Philippines and just whatever else but then they’re like “Hmm what if America tries to stop us? Ooh! Let’s surprise attack Hawaii!” So that’s exactly what they do. The attack is very successful but only in a strictly technical sense. To put it in perspective, let’s try a metaphor. Let’s say you’re having a barbecue but you don’t want to get stung by any bees so you find your local beehive and just go crazy on it with a baseball bat. Make sense? THEN YOU MUST BE JAPAN IN THE ’40s. WHO ELSE WOULD EVER DO THIS? So the U.S. swarms on Japan, obviously but that’s where our bee metaphor breaks down because while bees can sting you they cannot put you in concentration camps (or at least, I haven’t met any bees that can do that). Yeah, after that surprise attack on Pearl Harbor everybody on the West Coast is like “OMG WE’RE AT WAR WITH JAPAN AND THERE ARE JAPANESE DUDES LIVING ALLLL AROUND US.” I mean, they already banned Japanese immigration like a decade before but there are still Japanese dudes all over the coast and what’s more those Japanese dudes are living right next door to all the important aircraft factories and landing strips and shipyards and farmland and forests and bridges almost as if those types of things are EVERYWHERE and thus impossible not to live next door to. Whatever, it’s pretty suspicious. Now, at this point, nothing has been sabotaged and some people think that means they’re safe. But not military geniuses like Earl Warren who points out that the only reason there’s been no sabotage is that the Japanese are waiting for their moment and the fact that there has been no sabotage yet is ALL THE PROOF WE NEED to determine that sabotage is being planned. Frank Roosevelt hears this and he’s like “That’s some pretty shaky logic but I really don’t like Japanese people. Okay, go ahead.” So he passes an executive order that just says “Any enemy ex-patriots can be kicked out of any war zone I designate. P.S.: California, Oregon, and Washington are war zones have fun with that.” So they kick all the Japanese off the coast forcing them to sell everything they own but people are still not satisfied. They’re like “Those guys look funny! We can’t have funny-looking dudes roaming around this is wartime! We gotta lock ’em up.” And FDR is like “Okay, sure.” So they herd all the Japanese into big camps where they are concentrated in large numbers like a hundred and ten thousand people total and then the military is like “Okay, guys we will let you go if you fill out this loyalty questionnaire that says you love the United States and are totally down to be in our army” and some dudes are like “Sweet, free release!” but some dudes are like “Seriously? You just put me in jail for being Asian. This country is just one giant asshole and it’s squatting directly over my head.” And the military is like “Ooh, sorry to hear that buddy looks like you’re gonna stay here for the whole war. Meanwhile your friends get to go fight and die FOR FREEDOM.

In 1924, riding a wave of anti-Asian sentiment, the US government halted almost all immigration from Asia. Within a few years, California, along with several other states, banned marriages between white people and those of Asian descent. With the onset of World War II, the FBI began the Custodial Detention Index—a list of “enemy aliens,” based on demographic data, who might prove a threat to national security, but also included American citizens—second- and third-generation Japanese Americans. This list was later used to facilitate the internment of Japanese Americans. In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Alien Registration Act, which compelled Japanese immigrants over the age of fourteen to be registered and fingerprinted, and to take a loyalty oath to our government. Japanese Americans were subject to curfews, their bank accounts often frozen and insurance policies canceled. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked a US military base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. More than 2,400 Americans were killed. The following day, America declared war on Japan. On February 19, 1942, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, permitting the US secretary of war and military commanders to “prescribe military areas” on American soil that allowed the exclusion of any and all persons. This paved the way for the forced internment of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans, without trial or cause. The ten “relocation centers” were all in remote, virtually uninhabitable desert areas. Internees lived in horrible, unsanitary conditions that included forced labor. On December 17, 1944, FDR announced the end of Japanese American internment. But many internees had no home to return to, having lost their livelihoods and property. Each internee was given twenty-five dollars and a train ticket to the place they used to live. Not one Japanese American was found guilty of treason or acts of sedition during World War II.

From the Author Matthew 16:25 says, “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”  This is a perfect picture of the life of Nate Saint; he gave up his life so God could reveal a greater glory in him and through him. I first heard the story of Operation Auca when I was eight years old, and ever since then I have been inspired by Nate’s commitment to the cause of Christ. He was determined to carry out God’s will for his life in spite of fears, failures, and physical challenges. For several years of my life, I lived and ministered with my parents who were missionaries on the island of Jamaica. My experiences during those years gave me a passion for sharing the stories of those who make great sacrifices to carry the gospel around the world. As I wrote this book, learning more about Nate Saint’s life—seeing his spirit and his struggles—was both enlightening and encouraging to me. It is my prayer that this book will provide a window into Nate Saint’s vision—his desires, dreams, and dedication. I pray his example will convince young people to step out of their comfort zones and wholeheartedly seek God’s will for their lives. That is Nate Saint’s legacy: changing the world for Christ, one person and one day at a time.   Nate Saint Timeline 1923 Nate Saint born. 1924 Stalin rises to power in Russia. 1930 Nate’s first flight, aged 7 with his brother, Sam. 1933 Nate’s second flight with his brother, Sam. 1936 Nate made his public profession of faith. 1937 Nate develops bone infection. 1939 World War II begins. 1940 Winston Churchill becomes British Prime Minister. 1941 Nate graduates from Wheaton College. Nate takes first flying lesson. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. 1942 Nate’s induction into the Army Air Corps. 1943 Nate learns he is to be transferred to Indiana. 1945 Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan by U.S. 1946 Nate discharged from the Army. 1947 Nate accepted for Wheaton College. 1948 Nate and Marj are married and begin work in Eduador. Nate crashes his plane in Quito. 1949 Nate’s first child, Kathy, is born. Germany divided into East and West. 1950 Korean War begins. 1951 Nate’s second child, Stephen, is born. 1952 The Saint family return home to the U.S. 1953 Nate comes down with pneumonia. Nate and Henry fly to Ecuador. 1954 The first nuclear-powered submarine is launched. Nate’s third child, Phillip, is born. 1955 Nate is joined by Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming and Roger Youderian. Nate spots an Auca village for the first time. Operation Auca commences. 1956 The group sets up camp four miles from the Auca territory. Nate and the group are killed on “Palm Beach”.

Another episode startled Trump’s advisers on the Asia trip. As the president and his entourage embarked on the journey, they stopped in Hawaii on November 3 to break up the long flight and allow Air Force One to refuel. White House aides arranged for the president and first lady to make a somber pilgrimage so many of their predecessors had made: to visit Pearl Harbor and honor the twenty-three hundred American sailors, soldiers, and marines who lost their lives there. The first couple was set to take a private tour of the USS Arizona Memorial, which sits just off the coast of Honolulu and straddles the hull of the battleship that sank into the Pacific during the Japanese surprise bombing attack in 1941. As a passenger boat ferried the Trumps to the stark white memorial, the president pulled Kelly aside for a quiet consult. “Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?” Trump asked his chief of staff. Kelly was momentarily stunned. Trump had heard the phrase “Pearl Harbor” and appeared to understand that he was visiting the scene of a historic battle, but he did not seem to know much else. Kelly explained to him that the stealth Japanese attack here had devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet and prompted the country’s entrance into World War II, eventually leading the United States to drop atom bombs on Japan. If Trump had learned about “a date which will live in infamy” in school, it hadn’t really pierced his consciousness or stuck with him. “He was at times dangerously uninformed,” said one senior former adviser. Trump’s lack of basic historical knowledge surprised some foreign leaders as well. When he met with President Emmanuel Macron of France at the United Nations back in September 2017, Trump complimented him on the spectacular Bastille Day military parade they had attended together that summer in Paris. Trump said he did not realize until seeing the parade that France had had such a rich history of military conquest. He told Macron something along the lines of “You know, I really didn’t know, but the French have won a lot of battles. I didn’t know.” A senior European official observed, “He’s totally ignorant of everything. But he doesn’t care. He’s not interested.” Tillerson developed a polite and self-effacing way to manage the gaps in Trump’s knowledge. If he saw the president was completely lost in the conversation with a foreign leader, other advisers noticed, the secretary of state would step in to ask a question. As Tillerson lodged his question, he would reframe the topic by explaining some of the basics at issue, giving Trump a little time to think. Over time, the president developed a tell that he would use to get out of a sticky conversation in which a world leader mentioned a topic that was totally foreign or unrecognizable to him. He would turn to McMaster, Tillerson

SUPERFICIAL OBSERVERS ARE QUICK to label as an apologist anyone who tries to explain the unsavory past of his or her country to the outside world. It should be clear in the following pages that justifying Japan’s behavior is the least of my aims in recounting the eight months leading up to the decision to attack Pearl Harbor. To the contrary, Japan’s leaders must be charged with the ultimate responsibility of initiating a war that was preventable and unwinnable. War should have been resisted with much greater vigor and much more patience. To be sure, it is all too easy to adopt an air of moral superiority when indicting those who lived many years ago. Still, that should not stand in the way of a critical evaluation of how and why such an irresponsible war was started. If anything, it is a great historical puzzle begging to be solved. And with the emotional distance that only time can accord, one should be able to look back on this highly emotive period of history with a clearer vision. Unfortunately, clarity does not come easily; so many complexities and paradoxes surrounded the fateful Japanese decision. There is no question that most Japanese leaders, out of either institutional or individual preferences, avoided open conflict among themselves. Their circuitous speech makes the interpretation of records particularly difficult. For most military leaders, any hint of weakness was to be avoided, so speaking decisively and publicly against war was unthinkable, even if they had serious doubts. That is why the same people, depending on the time, place, and occasion, can be seen arguing both for and against the war option. Some supported war at a liaison conference of top government and military leaders, for example, while making their desire to avoid it known to others in private. Many hoped somebody else would express their opinions for them.

During the Second World War, just when Chinese were finally being granted the right to apply for naturalization, Japanese were subjected to one of the most spectacular violations of civil rights in living memory. Soon after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese Americans living in the continental United States were rounded up and sent to internment camps. Here they were kept behind barbed wire and guarded by soldiers. The property they left behind was either stolen or sold at a sharp loss. At the time of the evacuation, the Federal Reserve Bank estimated Japanese property losses at $400 million382—a figure that, today, would be many billions. This wholesale internment was far worse than anything done to blacks then or since. Many of the men, women, and children who were rounded up are still living today. If any group in America had wanted to give up, blame white society, and try to live off its victim status, the Japanese could have. Instead, when the war was over, they went back to what was left of their lives and started over. Twenty-five years after the war, they had long since caught up with white society and, as a group, had incomes 32 percent above the national average.383 Asian Americans have not tried to blame others for their troubles or shirk responsibility for their own success or failure. They have looked to their own resources to succeed. White America has clearly oppressed them in the past, just as it has blacks. Some people have argued that Asian immigrants have the advantage of starting out fresh when they get to America, whereas blacks must constantly drag the baggage of slavery and oppression behind them. This obviously does not apply to the descendants of Asians who came to America a century ago practically in bondage and who, in many cases, were treated as badly as blacks. If racism is such an obstacle to success in America, why have Asians overcome it while blacks have not?

Because American cryptographers had also broken the Japanese naval code, the leaders in Washington also knew that Japan’s “measures” would include an attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet they withheld this critical information from the commanders in Hawaii, who might have headed off the attack or prepared themselves to defend against it.

In the history of warfare, a succession of bold ideas and weapons had promised to curb the tyranny of distance. The horse and the cavalry had revolutionised warfare and tamed distance; but the Boer War, where more than 300,000 horses were killed in the fighting, foreshadowed the declining role of the horse. In the First World War the flimsy aircraft flourished high above the trenches without seeming likely to conquer distance; and yet in the Second World War the Japanese launched their devastating aerial attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the huge American aircraft dropped the first atomic bombs on two distant Japanese cities in 1945. In various other phases of the war, however, distance was still a powerful obstacle. In the following decades the latest American and Soviet missiles covered vast distances, but many military leaders in the nuclear era believed that ‘the tyranny of distance’ was far from ended.

A significant element in the surprise at Pearl Harbor was the great number of Americans who couldn’t conceive of Japan successfully attacking the United States. The most influential Asianist in the American State Department was a man who’d spent five years teaching in China before being named consul general to a city at the heart of Japanese aggression: Mukden. Stanley Hornbeck insisted that no matter what Washington demanded of Tokyo, the timid Japanese would never attack.

As the Val dive-bombers sought other targets in addition to the Nevada, they found the battleship Pennsylvania as it sat in Dry Dock No. 1 along with two destroyers, Cassin and Downes. The lone occupant of Dry Dock No. 2 nearby was the destroyer Shaw. Several attacking planes dropped 550-pound bombs on the Shaw. Two penetrated the main deck near the five-inch guns forward of the bridge. A third went clean through the bridge superstructure and ruptured fuel tanks, setting the front half of the Shaw ablaze. This fire caused the forward magazines to detonate just as they had on the Arizona. A huge explosion, second only to that on the Arizona, sent a mass of flames and mangled metal into the air. A great deal of it landed on the decks of the nearby Nevada, making it twice in less than an hour that the battleship had come under such an assault. Meanwhile, the Shaw broke in two. Finding Hospital Point not so hospitable, a tug pushed the Nevada off the beach and across the channel to a new resting spot aground on Waipio Peninsula across from Ford Island. As Robert Meyer observed, the battleship “kept its deck above water but not by much.” Meanwhile, the Arizona and the rest of the battleships strewn along Battleship Row were not going anywhere.1

As the shooting crackled all over Oahu, sooner or later someone was bound to get hurt. An elderly Japanese fisherman, Sutematsu Kida, his son Kiichi, and two others were killed by a patrol plane as their sampan passed Barbers Point, returning with the day’s catch. They had gone out before the attack and probably never knew there was a war. In Pearl Harbor itself, a machine gun on the California accidentally cut down two Utah survivors while they stood on the deck of the Argonne during one of the false alarms.

The time had come to deploy for the attack, and Commander Fuchida had a difficult decision to make. The plan provided for either “Surprise” or “Surprise Lost” conditions. If “Surprise,” the torpedo planes were to go in first, then the horizontal bombers, finally the dive-bombers, while the fighters remained above for protection. (The idea was to drop as many torpedoes as possible before the smoke from the dive-bombing ruined the targets.) On the other hand, if the raiders had been detected and it was “Surprise Lost,” the dive-bombers and fighters would hit the airfields and antiaircraft defenses first; then the torpedo planes would come in when resistance was crushed. To tell the planes which deployment to take, Commander Fuchida was to fire his signal gun once for “Surprise,” twice for “Surprise Lost.” Trouble was, Commander Fuchida didn’t know whether the Americans had caught on or not. The reconnaissance planes were meant to tell him, but they hadn’t reported yet. It was now 7:40 A.M., and he couldn’t wait any longer. They were already well down the west coast and about opposite Haleiwa. Playing a hunch, he decided he could carry off the surprise. He held out his signal pistol and fired one “black dragon.” The dive-bombers began circling upward to 12,000 feet; the horizontal bombers spiraled down to 3500; the torpedo planes dropped until they barely skimmed the sea, ready for the honor of leading the assault. As the planes orbited into position, Fuchida noticed that the fighters weren’t responding at all. He decided that they must have missed his signal, so he reached out and fired another “black dragon.” The fighters saw it this time, but so did the dive-bombers. They decided it was the second “black dragon” of the “Surprise Lost” signal. Hence, they would be the ones to go in first. In a welter of confusion, the High Command’s plan for carefully integrated phases vanished; dive-bombers and torpedo planes eagerly prepared to slam into Pearl Harbor at the same time.

Total casualties, including civilians, from the Japanese attack of December 7, 1941, were 2,403 killed and 1,178 wounded. Of the number of dead, almost one half—1,177 men—were on the Arizona, out of the complement of 1,514 assigned to the ship. The sinking of the Arizona remains the worst single military ship disaster in American history.

Of the 337 Arizona crew members who survived the attack, about two thirds were not aboard the Arizona that morning. They were ashore on liberty, staying in the Bachelor Officer Quarters on Ford Island, or temporarily assigned to other stations. Of the dead, more than nine hundred officers, sailors, and Marines—from Rear Admiral Isaac Kidd to just-reported-aboard Private Leo Amundson—remain entombed in the sunken hull of the Arizona.

The second wave of Japanese attackers was less than an hour behind the first. This time, knowing the defenders would be on the alert, slow-flying, low-altitude torpedo planes were judged too vulnerable to antiaircraft fire and were not included in the attack. Only Val dive-bombers and high-altitude Kates delivered the punches, but they reversed the targets of their comrades an hour earlier. Instead of the battleships, the Kates dropped their bombs on planes and installations on Ford Island and at Hickam Field. Eighteen struck Ford Island, although the billowing smoke from the Arizona and other fires was so intense that it obscured much of the target. Twenty-seven bombers hit Hickam, while the remaining nine Kates pummeled Kaneohe Naval Air Station on the eastern shores of Oahu. The eighty Val dive-bombers largely sought targets of opportunity among the undamaged ships throughout the harbor. Judging that resistance from American fighters had been suppressed by the first strike, the thirty-six Zeroes accompanying the second wave broke into two groups and went after their own targets. Eighteen hit Kaneohe and Bellows Field, while the remaining Zeroes strafed service buildings and parked aircraft at Hickam Field. Even if few American planes were flying, a barrage of antiaircraft fire from ships in the harbor shot down six Zeroes and fourteen Vals in this second wave.

What Hitler has done is attack the nation with the largest landmass on earth. This makes as much sense to me as loading up the Japanese army and ferrying them over to California to invade the entire United States.

Lockard and Elliott were, of course, looking at far more than fifty planes. In fact, the first wave of Japanese attackers approaching northern Oahu numbered 183 aircraft: 43 Mitsubishi A6M “Zero” fighters; 51 Aichi D3A “Val” dive-bombers; 49 Nakajima B5N2 “Kate” bombers deployed with bombs for a high altitude attack; and 40 “Kate” bombers armed with torpedoes. Even as Lockard and Elliott watched this mass come closer, 170 more planes, part of a second attack wave, rose from their carrier decks and streaked south.15

Meanwhile, Honolulu, too, had been under attack—or so it seemed. Japanese aircraft had not dropped bombs on the city, but American antiaircraft shells, most improperly fused for detonation at altitude, had fallen on it. This unintended bombardment caused about forty explosions and added sixty-eight civilian deaths to the rising toll in the harbor. By about 10:30 a.m. Pearl Harbor time, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin rushed out the first of three extras that day, and Japan, with most of its attacking planes safely back on its carriers, had formally declared war on the United States and Great Britain.

In the harbor beyond Kimmel’s window, a flotilla of motor launches and small boats spread out across the water like frenzied water spiders. They carried the wounded first to the hospital ship Solace and then, after its hastily enlarged trauma space overflowed, to the main medical facilities on Hospital Point and a triage area set up on 1010 Dock adjacent to the Argonne. Some of the wounded were carried aboard the Argonne, where the warrant officers’ mess was converted into an emergency operating room. By midmorning, personnel from the Argonne and other ships had also set up a field hospital at the nearby Officers’ Club. On Hospital Point, Naval Hospital Pearl Harbor was a state-of-the-art facility with about 250 beds, but the carnage quickly taxed it well beyond anything its staff had ever imagined. The first casualties arrived even as the second wave of attackers still pounded the harbor. As more poured in, ambulatory patients on the wards with far less critical conditions were discharged or evacuated to vacant outbuildings and hastily erected tents behind the hospital. Within three hours, the hospital received 546 casualties and 313 dead.

During the chaos of the morning attacks, planes inbound from Enterprise, as well as a squadron of B-17 bombers coming from the mainland, had come under assault—from the attacking Japanese as well as the defenders. That was somewhat coincidental and to some extent unavoidable. Enterprise lost six planes in the melee. Halsey had been right to be worried. They were indeed shooting at his boys. By evening, however, defenders should have been alert to distinguish between friend and foe. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, incoming friendlies,” the control tower on Ford Island advised all ships and shore installations as this second group of aircraft from the Enterprise, the six Wildcats, entered the pattern with landing lights ablaze. But over the dry docks, nervous gunners on the Pennsylvania opened fire. That was all it took. The entire harbor erupted in gunfire. Four of the six Wildcats were shot down and three American pilots killed.

Getting underway again, Arizona cleared the Pearl Harbor entrance and steamed off for night battle practice. On the evening of October 22, Arizona, as part of Battleship Division One along with Nevada and Oklahoma, was still at sea conducting maneuvers. As darkness fell, Admiral Kidd, as COMBATDIV One on Arizona leading the way, ordered the three ships out of column and into a line abreast. As the lead ship, Arizona occasionally flashed a searchlight off low-hanging clouds as a reference point. Nonetheless, the distance between Arizona and Oklahoma to port decreased until it became uncomfortably close. Aboard Arizona, Captain Van Valkenburgh ordered hard right rudder and signaled for flank speed. On Oklahoma, its captain ordered full astern as his ship was constrained from turning left by the proximity of the Nevada on his port beam. Both ships sounded collision sirens, but it was too late. Oklahoma, having a reinforced bow meant for ramming, struck the Arizona, a glancing blow on the port quarter. The portside torpedo blister meant to absorb torpedo attacks took the brunt of the blow. It resulted in a V-shaped gash in the blister four feet wide and twelve feet high. The structural integrity of the Arizona’s hull was not compromised, but this damage necessitated the ship’s return to Pearl Harbor for a week in dry dock. The Oklahoma got off easy with only the jack staff on its bow bent out of shape from the force of the impact.10

Whatever anxiety crew members on the Arizona and throughout the Pacific Fleet felt about the future would have been heightened had they known that on this same Thanksgiving day, the War and Navy departments in Washington issued what came to be called their “war warning” to all commands: “negotiations with Japan looking toward stabilization of conditions in the Pacific have ceased and an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days.” At Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, met with Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., the commander of his carrier forces, and Army Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, commander of land forces in Hawaii. Kimmel and Halsey had already organized task forces of cruisers and destroyers around the three aircraft carriers then operating in the Pacific: Lexington (CV-2), Saratoga (CV-3), and Enterprise (CV-6). To guard against a concerted attack or sabotage, they adopted a general protocol that only one carrier task force would be in Pearl Harbor at any one time. At the moment, this meant alternating between Lexington and Enterprise because Saratoga had yet to return to Hawaiian waters after a lengthy overhaul at Bremerton. A similar alternating routine was supposed to be in place among the three battleship divisions. Of the nine battleships in those three-ship divisions, Colorado was currently in Bremerton undergoing its own overhaul. With the war warning in hand, Admiral Kimmel and General Short concerned themselves primarily with the outer boundaries of their commands and not with Hawaii itself. The chief topic they discussed with Halsey was the delivery of aircraft to reinforce garrisons on Wake and Midway islands. Short wanted to deploy Army squadrons of new P-40s, but Halsey quoted an arcane regulation that Army pilots were required to stay within fifteen miles of land and asked what good they would be in protecting an island.

The Japanese were fully aware of the U.S. Fleet doctrine to get underway in case of attack and to pass out to sea through Pearl Harbor's narrow entrance channel. To take full advantage of this eventuality the Japanese stationed five fleet submarines near the entrance and had about thirteen more submarines on patrol duty in other areas bordering Hawaii. These submarines left Yokohama on 11 November 1941 and sailed by different routes. Five of the large submarines carried midget submarines on their decks.

However, the recent uncovering of official documents by Japanese scholar and professor Takeo Iguchi clearly shows that Japan did not comply with international law, as it purposefully and intentionally hid its true intention of war from the United States in hopes of succeeding in their surprise attack. Pearl Harbor was indeed planned and executed as a surprise attack, and its main objective was to cripple and neutralize the Pacific Fleet of the US Navy.

The active units of the fleet operated on a strenuous schedule of training. They were engaged in sea maneuvers about 60 percent of the time and were in port at Pearl Harbor the other 40 percent. The submarines based at Pearl Harbor operated on a special schedule, while all other ships were divided into three separate task forces which overlapped each other in their scheduled time at sea and in port. While at sea, major units of the fleet were screened by aircraft and destroyers to be sure that enemy submarines were not in the operating areas. It was assumed that the operating areas were infested with Japanese submarines, and that a surprise attack would be by submarines against major units of the fleet.

We got out of drydock on November 12 and went to sea again. This time we stayed out longer than normal, around two weeks, as I recall. We were on high alert, because there had been numerous sonar blips indicating the presence of submarines. Though we fired in their direction from time to time, we never hit one. Mostly they ran silent and deep, but they were running shallower now, at periscope depth, apparently not to attack but merely to observe. They were charting our movements, we surmised, trying to detect patterns in our movement, looking for any points of vulnerability.

Okinawa was the last major battle of the bloodiest war the world had ever seen. (It has been pointed out to me that, by virtue of fighting in both the Pearl Harbor attack and the Okinawa invasion, I can claim a small footnote in history for having served at the opening shots and the final battle of America’s Second World War.) The campaign claimed the lives of more than a quarter million people. Of those who died, close to 140,000 were civilians living on the island; 107,539 were Japanese servicemen; and 12,274 were U. S. servicemen. The battle pitted the greatest U. S. naval flotilla ever assembled against the most tenacious of enemies, both in the air and on the ground. In the sky, kamikaze pilots flew to their deaths as they ravaged the U. S. fleet. On the land, Japanese soldiers fought to the death rather than surrender. The radar picket ships took the biggest beating of the U. S. naval ships engaged at Okinawa, all the while protecting the rest of our ships from 1,900 kamikaze attacks. Fifteen of the picket ships were sunk; 45 were damaged. Causalties of those serving on those ships were 1,348 dead and 1,586 wounded.

Early the following year, Arizona steamed from its home port at San Pedro to Hawaii to participate in Army-Navy Grand Joint Exercise No. 4. It was a mouthful of a name for a round of war games that simulated an attack on Oahu from “enemy” aircraft carriers lurking to the north. Near sunrise on February 7, 1932, the first strike of carrier planes caught Army Air Corps bases by surprise. A second wave achieved similar results after slow-to-respond Army pilots landed for refueling and breakfast. In the after-action critique, the Army protested that the Navy’s attack at daybreak on a Sunday morning, while technically permitted under the rules, was a dirty trick.8 A few weeks later, on March 2, Arizona entered Pearl Harbor for the first time. Pearl Harbor in the early 1930s was minuscule compared to the massive installation it would become just one decade later. Despite wide inner lochs—bays of water spreading out from the main channel—its entrance was historically shallow. Nineteenth-century visitors had anchored off Honolulu a few miles to the east instead. In 1887, Hawaii’s King Kalākaua granted the United States the exclusive right to establish a coaling and repair station in Pearl Harbor and improve the entrance as it saw fit. No facilities were built, but the United States annexed the Hawaiian Islands in 1898. When the American Navy built its first installations within months of annexation, they were at Honolulu, not Pearl Harbor, because of the difficult channel access. Finally, in 1908, Congress authorized dredging the channel entrance and constructing a dry dock, as well as adding accompanying shops and supply buildings. Naval Station Pearl Harbor was officially dedicated in August 1919. The Army and Navy jointly acquired Ford Island in the harbor’s center for shared airfield facilities that same year.9

By 1937, with Japan gaining military strength and using it to invade China, American war planners devised a worst-case scenario in the event of an attack on the Philippines. It called for a withdrawal to a defensive Alaska–Oahu–Panama line in the eastern Pacific—a strategic triangle—and an economic boycott to constrain Japan while sufficient forces were mobilized. As war clouds again loomed in Europe, Plan Orange and other singular-foe plans evolved into “Rainbow” war plans that anticipated simultaneous operations against multiple foes. In effect, this meant a two-ocean war and operations in both the Atlantic and Pacific.

The supply ship Antares (AG-10) was inbound to Pearl Harbor, heading toward the submarine nets protecting the entrance channel. Between Antares and the barge it was towing, Captain Outerbridge made out the unmistakable silhouette of the conning tower and periscope of an unknown submarine. There was no doubt in his mind that this was an intruder intent on following Antares through the open submarine nets and into the harbor. Outerbridge called for speed and ordered a turn toward the target as the Ward surged to twenty knots. At 6:45 a.m. the destroyer fired two shots from its four-inch guns. The first passed directly over the submarine’s conning tower and missed. The second hit the submarine at the waterline between the conning tower and its hull. As the Ward’s action report later characterized it, “This was a square positive hit.” The target heeled over to starboard and appeared to slow and sink, drifting into a tightly spaced salvo of depth charges set for 100 feet that the Ward dropped as it crossed the submarine’s bow. Outerbridge couldn’t be certain, but a large oil slick on the surface after the depth charges exploded indicated that his quarry had likely sunk. He radioed a voice transmission saying the Ward had “dropped depth charges upon subs,” but two minutes later, fearing that the report might be taken merely as one more in a long line of sketchy contacts, Outerbridge made clear that this had been no illusion: “We have attacked, fired upon, and dropped depth charges on a submarine operating in defensive sea area,” he radioed. Seconds later, just to be certain his information had been received, Outerbridge queried, “Did you get that last message?” The answer was yes, and the report made its way up the chain of command, reaching Admiral Kimmel about forty minutes later. Like others who’d relayed the message, Kimmel was skeptical. “I was not at all certain that this was a real attack,” he later told investigators. It would take sixty years before a Japanese midget submarine was discovered in some twelve hundred feet of water with a hole in its conning tower—evidence that Outerbridge and the Ward had indeed inflicted the first casualties of the day.4

Windbag leftwing commentators, with their phony British accents and their odor of pseudointellectualism, could now drone on interminably with such garbage as comparing the Capital incursion to the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 and to Pearl Harbor.

On 7 December 1941, all major combatant ships at Pearl Harbor were in condition "X" with two machine guns manned and two 5-inch anti-aircraft guns with ready ammunition and crews near at hand. After the attack began, the ships assumed condition "Y" or "Z" as rapidly as possible. The battleships had been in port for several days and had been refueled. Most of the ships were ninety-five percent full of fuel oil. The degree of closure of water-tight doors and hatches is determined by the conditions named. Condition "X" is the minimum safety condition, while condition "Z" is the battle closure condition. Condition "Y" is between the two. These are usually designated by their alphabetical names, that is "X-ray," "Yoke," and "Zed.

Almost four years ago, the Japanese had sneak-attacked Pearl Harbor, a US naval base in the Hawaiian Islands.

Bosun Calhoun then launched into an account of the attack the day before and reviewed the damage suffered by the sunken battleships. He said the USS Nevada was berthed astern of the Arizona when she was struck by a torpedo in her bow. She managed to get under way with her guns blazing, the only battleship able to do so. As she rounded the southern tip of Ford Island, she was smashed with an avalanche of bombs, which started intense fires. When the thick, pungent smoke from the fires poured into the machinery spaces, the black gang, or engineers, headed for topside and fresh air. This forced abandonment left the pumping machinery inoperative. The forward ammunition magazines were purposely flooded to prevent explosions from the fires, but the after magazines were also flooded by mistake, which caused the ship to sink lower and lower in the water. In addition, ballast tanks were flooded on the starboard side to correct a port list. As more water entered the ship, many fittings that passed through watertight bulkheads began to leak, flooding all machinery spaces and causing loss of all electrical and mechanical power. Nevada was sinking in the ship channel.

Arizona is the only sunken ship that remains a commissioned vessel of the U.S. Navy. It honors all those who died during the attack on 7 December 1941. Passing honors are rendered to her as warships sail past.

One morning two of the surviving crew members on the Nevada, Lt. Lawrence Gray and CPO Daniel Folsom, came aboard and opened a compartment test cap which allowed the poisonous gas to escape into an unventilated access trunk space. They were overcome by the gas and died almost immediately. Four other crew members came to their aid. They, too, were poisoned but managed to survive the dose of toxic gas. Although the Japanese planes were long since gone, the aftermath of their vicious attack was still killing American sailors.

Within a few months after the attack, the navy was pressured by Congress and the White House to bring up the bodies of the men who died on the Arizona. They felt it was imperative that they be given a proper burial. The navy argued long and hard behind the scenes against this proposal. Their primary objection was that none of the bodies, up to that point, had ever been recovered with heads or even finger flesh intact. Individual dog tags that had been worn around the neck for identification had fallen off in the murky water and been lost. Based on this, it seemed impossible to positively identify any of the bodies. It also would have been heartless and cruel to describe the condition of the bodies to their families. There was no kind way to explain that scavenger crabs had devoured the exposed body parts.

For a long time, the United States of America focused much of its security concerns on the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean. The recognition of the Pacific Ocean as a vitally important front for war was not high on America’s list of priorities. Only after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor did the strategic significance of Hawaiʻi become a top priority, so much so that the current headquarters for the commander in chief of the US Pacific Command is located in Hawaiʻi, and it is the central base for US Navy, Air Force, and Army operations for the region.

Daniel Inouye, a nisei senior at McKinley High School long before he became a U.S. senator, furiously pedaled his bike to help at an aid station. He looked up into the sky and said to himself: “You dirty Japs!” On cruiser San Francisco an engineer came topside to join Ensign John Parrott. “I thought I’d come up and die with you.” Rear Admiral William Furlong stood on the bridge wing on Helena. A gunner called: “Excuse me, admiral, would you mind moving so we can shoot through here?” An officer playing golf went into a sand trap after his ball to find a soldier there shooting a rifle into the air. A bomb blew off a comer of a guardhouse. The inmates rushed out to help set up a .50 caliber machine gun. The phone rang in a Hickam hangar and someone reflexively picked it up. The caller wanted to know what all the noise was about. Kimmel stood in a window at his headquarters as a spent bullet tumbled in the window and hit him on the chest, smudging his whites. “It would have been better if it killed me,” he said. Down the hall Layton, Kimmel’s intelligence officer, caught sight of Admiral Bye who the day before had said the Japanese would never attack the United States. He was wearing a life jacket, his whites smeared with oil, staring wordlessly into the middle distance. “Soc” McMorris appeared: “Well, Layton, if it’s any satisfaction to you, we were wrong and you were right.” •

It is little remembered that there was a second Pearl Harbor. Ten hours after being alerted to the first, Japanese planes struck Clark Field in the Philippines, destroying one hundred and two planes, including all but three of General Brereton’s B-17s. He had pleaded with MacArthur to attack Japanese air bases in Formosa. MacArthur replied through his aide, Major General Richard K. Sutherland, that he had been ordered not to make “the first overt act.” What was Pearl Harbor if not an overt act? Brereton demanded. While the debate went on, the Japanese, at first delayed by fog, hit near high noon, finding MacArthur’s planes nearly lined up in rows like the shooting gallery it was. “What the hell!” roared Air Corps chief Hap Arnold when he heard about it. • • • • • At 1458 in Honolulu, Tadeo Fuchikami finally made his delivery of Marshall’s alert to the “Commanding General” at Fort Shafter. It was thrown in a wastebasket without carrying out the request to pass it on to the Navy. “For a while I thought the Day of Infamy had been my fault,” Fuchikami mused many years later. Then I realized I was just one of the sands of time.” The Pearl Harbor attack had left eighteen warships sunk or damaged, including five battleships, and one hundred and eighty-eight planes destroyed. The raid killed two thousand four hundred and three Americans. The Japanese lost twenty-nine planes and fifty-five fliers. Kido butai returned home with three hundred and twenty-four surviving planes.

At Pearl Harbor, the second wave of the attack delivered another body blow from 0915 to 0945. Then the attackers flew off to the north. Opana radar, which had been turned back on at 0900, tracked the planes north but the Army didn’t tell the Navy which was sending its remaining planes looking for the carriers to the south and west. Fuchida was the last to land at 1300. He, Genda and others argued strenuously but futilely with Nagumo to renew the attack. The crucial oil tanks had yet to be hit. With them gone, the remaining American fleet would be powerless. But the admiral was adamant. Kido butai turned for home.

Harbor. In a message to Secretary of State Hull on January 27, 1941, he reported: A member of the Embassy staff . . . had heard from many quarters, including a Japanese one, that a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor was planned by the Japanese military forces in case of “trouble” between Japan and the United States.56 In the monthly chronological report to Hull on the same date, Grew 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 that the boys in Hawaii are not precisely asleep.57

Suppose a top politician, entertainment figure, or sports star said it didn't really matter who shot Lincoln or why, who attacked Pearl Harbor, the Alamo or the USS Liberty. Imagine the derision. Imagine the ridicule. Imagine the loss in credibility and marketing revenue. Now imagine if a well-respected academic 'who should know better' said exactly the same thing. It doesn't really matter who committed a great crime; history had nothing to teach us; we should never waste precious time trying to apprehend the perpetrators, nor understand their motives but focus only on the outcome of their foul deeds. Well, that is exactly what Noam Chomsky appears to believe. Do not focus on the plot or the plotters or the clever planning of any crime but only the aftermath. Strangely, I had always thought linguistics was the scientific study of language rather than a lame attempt at disinformation.

There was a lot of nervous tension at that time on all levels of society over the alarming developments in Europe and Asia. Magazines speculated grimly on whether war with Japan was inevitable. Then our attention was diverted from Japanese aggression in China to the Nazi conquests in Europe. On December 7, 1941, we were thrown into war by the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, and I was thrown out of the Multimixer business. Supplies of copper, used in winding the motors for Multimixer, were restricted by the war effort. A

Journalists were among those who thought that way. Clarke Beach, for example, in a September 6 article for the local newspaper, the Star-Bulletin, wrote, “A Japanese attack on Hawaii is regarded as the most unlikely thing in the world, with one chance in a million of being successful.

Posted on the other side of the world, it was early on the morning of December 8 in the Philippines when Douglas MacArthur received news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor hours earlier. With that, it could only be a matter of time before the Japanese attacked the Philippines. MacArthur’s air commander, Lewis Brereton, urged an immediate bombing raid against Formosa, but MacArthur dithered. Eventually, the heavy B-17 Flying Fortresses were scrambled for their own protection, only to be caught back on the ground refueling when the expected Japanese air raids hit mid-morning.

The Americans, Dutch and Australians had lost further vessels as well, notably at the battle of the Java Sea in February. As a result, when the summer of 1942 started, the only significant naval threat remaining to Japan in the Pacific was what remained of the American Pacific Fleet following the attack on Pearl Harbor, and some of those battleships had been pulled back to San Francisco. This fact was not known by Japan, but given their superiority in battleships, the Japanese were not overly concerned about the remnants of the American fleet either way. What had remained untouched by the attack on Pearl Harbor were the American carriers;

Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, honestly believed that he could reason with Adolf Hitler in good faith. Now, most history books find little else to say about Chamberlain and he is solely remembered for believing that he could pacify Herr Führer by signing the Munich Agreement of 1938. In doing this, he ceded to Germany the Sudetenland, a German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, without having any real authority to do so. Three days later, French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier followed suit, thereby giving the “German Reich” a piece of Czechoslovakia, consisting of the border districts of Bohemia, Moravia, and parts of Silesia. In March of 1939, German troops rolled in and occupied the territory. Three other parts broke off from Czechoslovakia, with one becoming the Slovak Republic, another part being annexed by Hungary, and the third part, which was borderland, becoming a part of Poland. These all came together to become satellite states and allies of Nazi Germany. On May 10, 1940, in a radio address to the 8th Pan American Scientific Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared, “I am a pacifist. You, my fellow citizens of twenty-one American Republics, are pacifists too.” Roosevelt was referring to Canada and Latin America. The United States attempted to remain neutral and did not enter into the war until four days after Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan. Roosevelt opposed the concept of war and made every attempt to find a peaceful solution to the hostilities in Europe. On December 11, 1941, after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, both Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.

On the afternoon of August 9, hearing the news that Nagasaki had been bombed, Emperor Hirohito called an imperial conference at which his ministers debated the wisdom of surrender. After hours of talk, at 2 a.m. Hirohito stated that he felt Japan should accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, terms of surrender proposed in late July by Truman (who had only become president on Roosevelt’s death in April). But Potsdam called for the emperor to step down; and his ministers insisted that their acceptance depended on Hirohito being allowed to remain as sovereign—an astute demand that would ensure a sense of national exoneration. James F. Byrnes, the U.S. secretary of state, did not deal directly with this, and on August 14 Japan surrendered at Hirohito’s command. The next day, the entire country heard with astonishment the first radio broadcast from a supreme ruler, now telling them squeakily, in the antiquated argot of the imperial court, that he was surrendering to save all mankind “from total extinction.” Until then, Japan’s goal had been full, all-out war, as a country wholly committed; any Japanese famously preferred to die for the emperor rather than to surrender. (One hundred million die together! was the slogan.) Today the goal was surrender: all-out peace. It was the emperor’s new will. Later that day a member of his cabinet, over the radio, formally denounced the United States for ignoring international law by dropping the atomic bombs. In 1988, on the forty-seventh anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when the mayor of Nagasaki accused Hirohito of responsibility for the war and its numerous atrocities, he inadvertently stirred up petitions for his own impeachment, and nationwide protests and riots calling for his assassination. A month afterward, in January 1989, Hirohito died at age eighty-seven, still emperor of Japan. Eleven days later the mayor, whom the Nagasaki police were no longer protecting, was shot in the back. He barely survived.

The CIA was born out of the disaster at Pearl Harbor. Despite warning signals, Japan achieved complete and overwhelming surprise in the December 7, 1941, attack that took the lives of more than twenty-four hundred Americans, sunk or damaged twenty-one ships in the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and thrust the United States into war.

The United States military officially began using canines in World War I and by World War II more than four hundred scout dogs were taking part in combat patrols, finding and hunting the enemy. After Pearl Harbor, a group of dog breeders formed “Dogs for Defense,” with the goal of building a well-trained canine force in the event America went to war. Come Korea, roughly 1,500 canines performed guard duty with the Army while others joined patrols. During Vietnam, with its close-quarters combat in treacherous terrain and tropical climes, dogs were once again called into action: around four thousand joined patrols to hunt for weapons and enemies, and served duty on army bases, especially at night when soldiers were most vulnerable to attack. But many of the dogs that served alongside U.S. soldiers never made it home; some were euthanized and others abandoned in

Having found the bomb, we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare.

The general public’s response to Pearl Harbor was a desire for revenge. We wanted to attack Japan.

Franklin D. Roosevelt arrested Americans on the basis of their race and put them into concentration camps. He executed first and then sought judicial approval. He even stole millions of dollars in gold from innocent, law-abiding Americans. He no doubt fomented the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and then punished innocent military officers for not having caught him.

In his 1999 book, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, Robert B. Stinnett, a navy photographer who served in the same World War II aerial group as former President George H. W. Bush, used documents acquired from a Freedom of Information Act request to demonstrate definitively that FDR knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor in advance and let it go as part of his larger strategy to provoke the Japanese into war.185 The smoking guns included several declassified, U.S.-decoded Japanese naval broadcasts, and spy communiqués which set forth a timetable, a census, and bombing plans for U.S. ships at Pearl Harbor, at least the contents of which were relayed to FDR and his aides.186 In large part, the book discussed a particularly damning piece of evidence called the McCollum Memo, a six-page document written in October 1940—fourteen months before the attack on Pearl Harbor—and addressed to two senior FDR military advisors outlining the steps for provoking the Japanese into making an overt act of war.187

The journalist and critic I. F. Stone would call the state of mind that permitted the Pearl Harbor attack “sheer stodgy unimaginative bureaucratic complacency.

The Chronicle published passenger lists of the returnees, while The Examiner did not shrink from describing the casualties of war: They came back to the mainland yesterday, the maimed and the blinded – the first war casualties to arrive from Hawaii.  Convoyed transports brought them.  And brought to San Francisco and the Nation, the horror and full impact of Japan’s treacherous Pearl Harbor attack. They jammed the ship (sic) hospitals, overflowed into staterooms.              There were men hideously burned by explosions.  There were fracture cases.