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December 7th, 1941 — Why Now?
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December 7th, 1941

by Bryan

The seventy-fourth anniversary of “a date which will live in infamy…”

The official US Navy site on the Pearl Harbor attack.

There will be a memorial service aboard NAS Pensacola that normally features local survivors of the attack. Obviously there are fewer of them every year.

2 comments

1 Badtux { 12.08.15 at 11:03 pm }

An interesting article from a few years ago. FDR was apparently appalled that the majority of the Pacific fleet lay on the bottom of Honolulu Bay as the result of an air raid. As a former Secretary of the Navy, it hit him personally that his beloved Navy had been so incompetent. Of course, the incompetence continued after that, such as Douglas MacArthur managing to get his entire air force caught on the ground and destroyed…

2 Bryan { 12.09.15 at 8:43 pm }

The carriers were the only major vessels not at port for Christmas, and the rest of US forces were also in a stand down mode. The biggest problem was that all intel went through the State Department. NSA and the rest of DoD’s intel organs were created following that little hold-up. The warning about the Japanese attack was sitting on a desk in the State Department for the entire weekend. Finding it on Monday didn’t make people happy. Kind of like what happened in 2001.

MacArthur took the attack on the Philippines personally because of how much of the nation his family owned, but that didn’t make him take precautions not to lose all of the long range US bombers in the Pacific.