A gleam in my Daddy's eye!!! But he tells me he remembers he was mowing his neighbors yard at the time.
Born in '46 ....only know what I read in history, and saw in the movies. I'd be curious as to what JO'Co's study of history tells him about what FDR knew and when he knew it regarding the attack. I have seen something that indicated that he knew it was coming but ignored it because he wanted a big reason to jump into WWII.
My dad was at ND and mom hadn't started dancin' in the USO when Pearl happened. I didn't come along until after dad got back from the pacific on his destroyer.
:idea: re: FDR and Pearl Harbor What FDR knew and when he knew it has been a controversy from the day of the attack. The president had a well deserved reputation as a manipulator of events, as well as a known penchant for stretching the truth (and the law) as far as he could get away with it... but allowing a foreign country to bomb his own Navy? I've never bought that theory. As a conservative Republican, I'd love to pin the tail on that donkey, so to speak. FDR deserves it; but the facts just don't support that conclusion. Franklin Roosevelt loved the Navy. As Assistant Secretary of the Navy he led the fight to expand the U.S. Navy and he was the founder of the U.S. Naval Reserve. He never would have done anything to harm the service that he held so dear. Beyond that, it's obvious that as commander-in-chief, he had millions of other ways to start a war without sacrificing a major part of his global defense forces. Remember, if the Japanese had launched their third wave against the shipyard repair facilities and storage depots (as they had planned to do) the Navy and Marines would have been forced to retreat all the way back to San Diego and Long Beach. It might have added years to the war in the Pacific and mandated an invasion of Hawaii to reclaim it at a cost of hundreds of thousands of American, civilian lives. He was a Navy guy who could read a map and he never would have intentionally placed Pearl Harbor in that kind of jeopardy. No. The cause of the war was the Japanese Imperial warlords who were running that country and their attack was near-perfect. The designer of that attack, Admiral Yamamoto, had been a student at Harvard and naval attache to the United States before the war. I've seen pictures of him dancing with a lampshade on his head at a Georgetown party. He knew his opponent very well and (unlike his arrogant Imperial Army counterparts) respected the American's military and fighting abilities. He left nothing to chance; even going so far as to create an exact duplicate of Pearl Harbor in Japan and rehearsing the attack over and over again for nearly two years before the event. No: it wasn't Roosevelt. Sometimes the other guy is good too. We were caught napping and failing to prepare and plan for a war that the Japanese Imperial Fleet had been rehearsing in Tokyo Bay. That's our fault...we the people. The American who best understood what had happened that day, was Pearl Harbor's base commander Admiral Husband E. Kimmel. As he watched the disaster unfold from his office window, a spent .50 caliber round broke through the glass, hitting him in the chest and landing on the floor. He turned to his shocked subordinates and said quietly, "It would have been more merciful if it had killed me." He knew. .............JO'Co
so..... where was I the day the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor? I was rushed into Rhode Island Hospital for an emergency appendectomy. !! There is no way I can ever forget that day! by the way.. i was hospitalized 10 days..now the procedure is done as out patient!