We recently wrote a piece about the forty eighth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November twenty second of this year. Now we have traveled the short but ever so long period until the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor on this date seventy years ago. John Kennedy was an ambassadors son in England around the time that Pearl Harbor occurred. Kennedy was not well because of his back problems but he so desperately wanted to be a part of the Second World War. Kennedy became a hero in the South Pacific during that conflict when his Patrol/Torpedo boat was sliced in half by a Japanese destroyer that came out of the darkness and thrust John Kennedy into the role that would help define the rest of his life. The heroics began on December seventh, 1941 when so many gave their lives in the infamous sneak attack that began on a quiet December Sunday morning in one of the most scenic places that the world has ever known.
The Japanese came from the north following the wavelength of one of Honolulu’s radio stations which led them right over Pearl Harbor. They encountered virtually no resistance at all. Before the day was done, over 2800 hundred American servicemen and women would lie dead, over twenty major ships would lie sunk, half sunk, or severely damaged, and, over three hundred American aircraft would lie destroyed, most still sitting on their assigned spots on the airfields around Pearl Harbor. The Japanese lost under thirty of the over three hundred aircraft that attacked Pearl Harbor that day. This situation would have been worse except that the Japanese admiral commanding the six aircraft carriers that carried out the raid did not send out the second wave of fighters that had been originally planned for that day. The Japanese were also unlucky because none of the American carriers were in port, and, the lack of a second wave of attackers left oil facilities and the entire American submarine fleet, proposed targets of that second attack, undamaged. For the early months of the war, that submarine fleet would keep the United States in the war at sea that would rage for the better part of the next four years.
Luck and providence were really with the Americans because, in May of 1942, at the Battle of Midway, an over whelming Japanese force bent on invading the Hawaiian Islands, was deprived of its carrier fleet when, in the space of five minutes, virtually all of the Japanese carriers, many who had participated in the Pearl Harbor attack, were dive bombed and set on fire with vulnerable planes and armaments sitting exposed on their decks, resulting on all of them being sunk. The war was effectively won on these few days in May but it would take another three plus years to finally extract a surrender from the empire of Japan after the Atomic bomb was introduced to the world at Hiroshima, and, then a second time, at the city of Nagasaki.
In the wake of Pearl Harbor, the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, knew that something dramatic had to be done to show the Japanese that the United States was indeed in this war to win it. What came out of that desire was the Doolittle raid on Tokyo. Taking some over weight bombers and placing them, stripped down , on an American aircraft carrier, they steamed as close to Japan as they could when they were seen by Japanese patrol craft. Doolittle and his all volunteer crews launched their attack, really more symbolic in nature than anything else, and did some damage to a city, the capital of Japan, that had been untouched by war for almost its entire, long, history. As the populous of Tokyo came down to view the damage in the aftermath of this attack, many in the active pacifist movement in Japan, and even more in its military suddenly came to the realization that this was going to be a very long, long, war. Admiral Yamamoto, the supreme commander of Japanese forces, had opposed the war to start with as he had lived in the United States before the war and had seen, first hand, just what the American capacities really were. He had told the Japanese militants that he might be able to hold off the Americans for perhaps a year to a year and a half, but, no longer than that. When Yamamoto found out that the Japanese diplomats in Washington D.C. had not been able to deliver their message of war before the attack on Pearl Harbor began, he stated that he feared that all the Japanese had done was to awaken a sleeping giant and fill them with a terrible resolve! Yamamoto was killed by an American sneak attack on his lightly escorted plane in 1943 as he visited one of the Japanese outposts.
Pearl Harbor lies quiet now even though it is still the command center of the American Pacific fleet. One can still see the machine gun pock marks on many of the building that the Japanese strafed on December seventh in their attempts to attack hospital and other land based personnel supporting the fleet as it lay dying out in the harbor. Battleship Row is still there with the concrete pillars that the ships were moored to sticking up out of the calm waters. The highlight of any trip there is a visit to the sight where the battleship Arizona still lies virtually undisturbed where it sank after a lucky shot sent a bomb down one of its smoke stacks and caused the ship to simply lift up out of the water from the force of the explosion that sank it. Over half of the Pearl Harbor dead are still entombed on that ship as it became the rallying cry for the entire war in the Pacific. Remember the Arizona! was the cry that rang out from that day forward until the final peace was achieved in late summer of 1945.
News reports today have stated that the Pearl Harbor Association, a group of survivors that return to the scene each and every year, is going to dissolve because of the advanced age of the survivors. This year will mark their last formal meeting. Someone has stated that the Navy might do something with the Arizona after the last survivor of that ship passes on. The oil still seeps from the ship as a silent sort of constant bleeding that will always remind those who care to remember what happened on that now receding and so tragic day seventy years ago.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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