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History See other History Articles Title: Pearl Harbor Revisited December 7, 1941. "A date," President Franklin D. Roosevelt solemnly proclaimed, "that will live in infamy." I remember hearing the radio report of the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. I was less than two and a half months past my eighth birthday at the time, but I can still recall how it made me feel – not fear, but a sense of foreboding. What was going to happen? Would Japanese troops soon be at our doorsteps? I vaguely recall my parents assuring me that that wouldn’t happen. But all of the American setbacks early in the war weren’t reassuring. A big scare for me came when my dad was called up for his draft physical. I can still remember vividly how happy my mom and I were when he wired us from Chicago (we had no phone in those days) that he had failed it. As I remembered, he was 4F because of ear problems brought on by a severe attack of vertigo that had put him flat on his back for three weeks back around 1937, but I also vaguely recall my mom once saying that it was some other problem. Whatever it was, it kept him home, and that was good enough for me. As a kid, I was thinking less of what might happen to him in the military than I was of his being away from home. Though he worked long hours every day as a hotel manager, when he wasn’t working he was always at home. Relatives, family friends, and neighbors did end up in uniform. My maternal uncle, who lived 600 miles away in a Detroit suburb, was an officer in the navy’s Armed Guard and commanded naval gun crews on a merchant ship transporting war materiel via the rough and hazardous North Atlantic up over the Scandinavian Peninsula to the Russian arctic port of Murmansk. A childhood friend of my folks, who by then lived in Chicago three hundred miles north of us, was also a navy officer. Both of my mom’s cousins married soldiers, one of whom served as a cook for a unit caught up in the Battle of the Bulge. The son of friends across the street was wounded by a landmine at Anzio, and spent fourteen months recuperating in a hospital. The young man next door served on a destroyer, and the fathers of two of my neighborhood friends were soldiers, one serving in the Pacific, the other in Europe. The two much older brothers of my best school buddy were Marines, and one of them was captured on Corregidor and spent the war in a Japanese prison camp. The two brothers who organized our sports activities after the war in the empty lot across from my house were veterans, the eldest an army officer who had been badly wounded in Europe. But once it became apparent that we weren’t going to be invaded, and once I was relieved of the necessity of worrying about my dad being drafted and taken away from home, the war became an adventure for me as a kid safely ensconced in Herrin, Illinois in the deep south of the state and in the middle of the country. There was a great battle between good and evil going on in that world out there, and the way that that battle was depicted in the popular culture as well as the news left no doubt that we Americans were on the side of good. Hadn’t those sneaky Japs attacked us, and hadn’t Germany declared war on us? And look at the atrocities those devils were committing. It was a time of moral clarity, and the movies, newsreels, radio adventures and news reports, comic books, and newspaper stories and comic strips I avidly watched, listened to, and/or read were full of American heroes doing battle against Axis monsters. The fact that I’m of Italian descent gave me occasional pause, since Italy was one of our enemies, but Italy’s heart wasn’t really in the war, and it didn’t receive the same amount of bad press as did Japan and Germany. Another vivid memory – this one of a sunny August afternoon in 1945. I was standing in our living room and though it was daylight, as I remember it, a floor lamp was turned on. If so, that may have been because my mom, who was then puttering around in the adjacent bedroom, had been sewing in the chair next to the lamp and wanted more light. The radio was on, and I heard the report that a whole Japanese city had been wiped out by a single bomb. I didn’t believe it. Surely the radio newsman was mistaken or exaggerating. Though I was more than a month and a half short of my twelfth birthday, I was quite well informed about things military. I knew all of our uniforms and insignia, if it was close enough for me to distinguish any details I could identify any of our military aircraft, and I knew the basic small arms of all of the major protagonists. I had even fired some of the latter – a German Luger, and courtesy of my navy uncle who bent the regs a bit to bring them up on leave for my dad and me, both gun enthusiasts, to try out, a GI .45, an M1 carbine, and a 1903A3 Springfield rifle. Well, I was wrong. One bomb had wiped out a whole city, and soon another single bomb wiped out another whole city. Wow! Neat! Given the black-and-white moral frame of reference to which my not-quite-twelve-year-old patriotic mind then subscribed, those sneaky little subhumans deserved what they got, and I never even considered that most of those who had been atomized were noncombatants – women, children, and old people. Remember Pearl Harbor! But about two years after World War II ended, I gradually became aware of something that left me quite puzzled. Our government and the news and entertainment media that had treated the Soviet Union and China as our trusted and honored allies during the war, had switched to treating them as being as evil as Germany and Japan had been during the war. And defeated Germany and Japan were being treated as allies of ours, well on their way to being as trusted and honored as the USSR and China had been in the war just ended. How could good and evil switch sides so quickly? I’d ponder that puzzling transformation now and again, but I still accepted the new alignment, and when I came of military age, I never even considered trying to avoid serving to help protect my country against the latest menace – international communism. I jumped at the chance to get a commission through the Air Force ROTC, and served in the North American Air Defense Command between the wars in Korea and Viet Nam. But though I’m still proud of having served my country in a defensive capacity, for various reasons I won’t take the time and space to spell out, I’ve become ever more questioning of our powers-that-be and the wars they’ve got us into over the years – even World War II. I mention all of the preceding so that the reader will know that the skepticism I now embrace isn’t rooted in a pacifistic, anti-military, anti-American, or left wing, etc., background. Now back to Pearl Harbor and FDR’s "day of infamy." If we are to believe John Toland’s Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath, Robert Stinnett’s Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor, Thomas J. Fleming’s The New Dealer’s War: FDR and the War Within World War II, and other such books, FDR, while promising to keep us out of the war, was doing everything he could to provoke either the Germans or the Japanese into attacking us so that he could get us in it, and he either knew that the Japanese were going to hit Pearl Harbor or that they would be hitting us somewhere about the time of that attack. But if we are to believe Duane Schultz’s The Maverick War, the moral clarity of our entry into WWII is undermined even more. In "October 1940, more than a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor," Claire Chennault, who would go on to organize and lead the famous mercenary fighter group, the Flying Tigers, in China, proposed a preemptive strike against Japan "to burn out the industrial centers of the Japanese empire using incendiaries and create terror and chaos among the populace." This would be a covert operation against a country with which we had peaceful diplomatic relations. The bombing missions were to be carried out by American mercenaries, men released from the army and navy and paid by the United States government through a private corporation. They were to fly American planes painted with Chinese insignia. What made the plan all the more bizarre was that the highest officials in the government, including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, approved of it. On July 23, 1941, some five months before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt formally authorized the strikes. They were to begin the following November." In December 1940, General George C. Marshall had managed to talk the administration out of this sneak attack on Japan on the grounds that the United States didn’t have the planes or crews to spare, and for fear that it "would provoke a Japanese counterattack on the United States at a time when we were woefully unprepared to go to war." But the plan was resurrected in the spring of 1941, and the raids would have been carried out in November of that year had not production and shipping bottlenecks delayed the arrival of Chennault’s bombers. On November 22, FDR’s special envoy to China informed him that he hoped that the bombers (twin-engine Lockheed Hudsons rather than the four-engine Boeing B-17s that Chennault had wanted) and their flight and ground crews would reach that country by the end of 1941, and 49 ground crewmen were at sea on their way there on December 7. When I was a kid, "Remember Pearl Harbor" was a righteous battle cry for me as well as, I suspect, most Americans. America the good and innocent, I and others believed, and most Americans who remember Pearl Harbor probably still believe, had been sneak attacked by the dastardly Japanese and forced to become involved in WWII. But there is good reason to believe that the sainted FDR and much of our leadership of the time were neither good nor innocent. I in no way want to come across as being sympathetic toward the brutal Japanese military of WWII, or as excusing their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. But not only did FDR and his bunch provoke the Japanese into attacking us, and not only is there good reason to believe that he allowed that sneak attack to occur in order to get us into the war, but he actually was preparing to launch his own sneak attack on Japan. And while the Japanese concentrated on military targets at Pearl Harbor, their objective being to cripple our Pacific fleet, our preemptive sneak attack on Japan was to be carried out under the flag of another nation, and was to be aimed at burning out cities in order to cripple that country’s industry and to terrorize its civilian populace. Day of infamy, indeed!
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#1. To: Ada (#0)
Another December By:Mary Ashby Slaughter [12/05/2007] "On Sunday, December 7, 1941, I had the morning off duty and was so glad to be able to sleep late as I was tired. At 8 o'clock I was awakened by terrific explosions. Excerpts from a letter home At first I thought it was the Coast Artillery across the street but the noise was so heavy and so persistent, above the drone of planes, I got out of bed to see what it looked like. I was amazed to see a black sky! ...three girls rushed in from the park and said, "we are at war - Pearl Harbor is in flames." Then our telephone rang - "All nurses at their posts." Betty Virginia always said I could get dressed quicker than anyone she ever saw - if she could have seen me that day! I smashed all previous records! ...planes were everywhere - smoke and gunfire. My ward which holds 44 patients had 38 patients of its own. The six beds that were empty we prepared for the casualties...and they were beginning to roll in. The most awful sight my eyes ever beheld. Arms, legs, hands, faces, insides and outsides gone. I've seen horrible pictures before in my life but...not anything like this wholesale slaughter before. We were busy giving heart stimulants, morphine, blood, glucose, redressing the severe bleeding, watching them die and all the time not a peep out of a blessed soul - courage - those boys were the bravest, sweetest boys I've ever seen." ...we worked all night - not once did I stop - all beds were filled and one poor soul was put out on the porch when I had filled all the beds. As soon as one died, the bed was freshly made and another took his place... ...this is being written between my duties and it is now 4 a.m., December 18, 1941 - the first quiet night we have had. ...keep the letters coming. Mary Ashby Slaughter was a young army nurse stationed at Hickam Army Hospital in Honolulu on the morning of December 7, 1941 when Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese. She was born March 24, 1908 at "The Oaks" in Washington and was the daughter of Francis Raymond and Mary Pauline Warden Slaughter of Rappahannock County. She died on December 31, 1996 at her home in Alexandria. ©Times Community Newspapers 2007 http://www.timescommunity.com/si...=461&dept_id=506090&rfi=6 ============================================== who benefitted? http://www.threeworldwars.com/overview.htm but you know that.
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