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jstan
climber
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During the War my father insisted our garden be a full acre. I still cannot look a hoe in the eye.
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neebee
Social climber
calif/texas
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hey there say, pud... as to this quote:
Dec 6, 2016 - 11:12am PT
My mom tells me stories of being strafed by zero's as she was running down the street to her grandmother's house during the attack.
She was 11 years old at the time.
It was a good experience to work on the film 60 years later.
oh my... :O for sure, that's not the 'usual tale' of remembering
ones 'childhood' ... as a mom tells her kid... oh my... :(
her own miracle, to reach gramma...
say, thank you for sharing, the EXPERIENCE of working on the film,
60 years later...
i always remember my thought, when very young and hear about this, for
the first time--pearl harbor...
it made me cry...
thank you, to all that shared about remembering
those that were there... :(
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neebee
Social climber
calif/texas
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hey there say, tami...
as to this quote:
And Boo and John , both your Dad's helped my Dad not go. He was training on Lancasters with the intention of being deployed the winter of 45/46 but it all ended.
Thanks to all veterans then and now. :
wow...
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neebee
Social climber
calif/texas
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hey there say, ksolem...
oh my... i read your story of your step'uncle... oh my...
overwhelming stories...
thanks for sharing your husband, too, here, park rat...
(did not read all the stories, yet, just brushed through fast) ...
will come back, again, then...
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
Sands Motel , Las Vegas
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My mom's 2 cousins , 2 Iverson boys , died on the Arizona....My grandfather strongly disliked the Japanese after that day...
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frank wyman
Mountain climber
montana
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Walked into the Cowboy Bar in Jackson Wyo. in the late "70's". everyone was drinkings these little shots of something, I asked what they were. They said "It is December 7th and we are drinking "KAMIKAZES" have one... They are not to bad but are small,Lets order a couple of pitchers of this stuff...Can't remember the rest of the night...
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John Duffield
Mountain climber
New York
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My mom tells me stories of being strafed by zero's as she was running down the street to her grandmother's house during the attack.
My Mom walked a line of Japanese bayonets getting off a ship in Shanghai aged 10. The Japanese were securing the city. Fortunately, Pearl Harbor had not yet occurred.
A Japanese Nakajima B5N torpedo bomber over Pearl Harbor
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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It's really a pity the 2nd lieutenant at the rudimentary radar station on the north side of Oahu
wasn't believed - an alarm could have saved a lot of lives. Thank heavens the carriers were
gone and that the Japs did not launch a clean-up attack.
Watching TGT's film brought back memories of being a Midshipman in the late 60's. We still
had to learn those stoopid signal flags! Aside from having radar our ships weren't drastically
different from those 30's ships when it came to systems and weaponry. However, we did have
nuclear ASROC anti-sub weapons!
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guyman
Social climber
Moorpark, CA.
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A Thank you to all Veterans on this day of "infamy" for doing what was required to keep all of us free.
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guyman
Social climber
Moorpark, CA.
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Reilly..... Some historians think that by having our fleet battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor, saved many more lives. If the fleet survived and then went out later to face the Japanese fleet at lets say Midway... they would have gone down in the deep blue water with a huge loss of life.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Guy, Midway was strictly a carrier engagement, was it not? The BB's would only have been
secondary targets. By 1941 BB's were pretty superfluous, except as tempting targets for Jap
subs. They were good for softening up LZ's but cruisers and DD's were just as good for that.
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guyman
Social climber
Moorpark, CA.
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TGT2 ..... yes that was a hard lesson learned. Our Government can get way out of control.
Reilly... yes, I know Midway was a Carrier vs Carrier engagement because Nimitz was much smarter than his Japanese foe and most of our Battleships were full of water stuck in the mud. There was a Japanese surface fleet charging hard for Midway, but that engagement was postponed only after they lost air cover.
Kris let me read a recent book on Midway, sorry forget authors names. It was really detailed with lots of footnotes etc.
What surprised me the most was the speed at witch the Navy changed and how many old time Fleet Admirals, Captains were fired because they could not really bring the fight to the Japs.... The Navy weeded out the folks who do good cocktail party.... and found the A%Sholes who could bring it.
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Fossil climber
Trad climber
Atlin, B. C.
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I was ten years old. I think we had just come back from church when the news came. The magnitude hadn’t become obvious yet, but we had just come from a lecture about peace and love, now came face to face with reality.
I was choked up by FDR’s address declaring war, the “Day of Infamy” speech. As a kid I somehow thought that we’d whip the “Japs” in short order. But when I heard on Dec. 11 that Germany had declared war on the US, it scared the hell out of me. Wrong on the first count, justified on the second.
Yamamoto was one smart cookie. He knew Japan couldn’t compete with the US in the long run but was forced by politics to launch a strike anyway, and he couldn’t have been much more effective.
I remember rationing - food, fuel, tires, etc. etc. The Office of Price Administration enforced rationing very harshly. People went to jail for black-marketing or cheating with their ration stamps. And the scrap drives. The Boy Scouts went around collecting everything from tin cans and scrap metal and rubber to newspapers and bacon fat, which housewives saved in a can when they actually got some bacon. My dad had a WW1 gas mask which was my pride and joy, and he donated it to the rubber drive.
Dad got a goat and tethered it in a vacant lot across the street. I thought it was a pet and loved it to pieces. Then it turned up on the table. That really hurt. They should have told me.
We saw propaganda films designed to create maximum hate for the enemy, not that they needed it. In grade school the older classes were shown a captured Japanese film showing Jap soldiers throwing a Chinese baby up in the air and catching it on a bayonet.
Toward the end of the war we started raising rabbits for meat. We had three pens out back. It was my job to take care of them. Also to slaughter, skin and butcher them. At first I tried the “rabbit punch” method of killing them, holding them up by the hind feet and whacking the back of the neck with a club. But they thrashed around a lot and I missed once or twice and it was brutal. So I took to letting them loose in the back yard and shooting them in the head with a .22. Dad had bought a 30-30 and a couple of .22s just after war was declared, and I was a good shot in short order. I think .22 long rifle cartridges were 37¢ for a box of 50. Or you could buy in bulk - 1000 at a time - through NRA - a lot cheaper. I went through a helluva lot of shells. I was especially pleased when a shot went in one eye and out the other. Yipes.
Dad was part of an organization which took turns going to the fire lookout on Mt. St. Helena to watch for enemy planes. I had a deck of cards with all the US, allied and enemy planes on it in silhouette, from below and the side. I could ID all of them in a fairly short time and tell you how they were armed. The was a training squadron of P39 Aircobras in Santa Rosa, and they used to buzz Calistoga to everybody’s cheers. One time a convoy of soldiers in open trucks was coming through town on Hwy. 29 and as I watched, they all threw up their 30 M1 Garands and dry-fired at a plane which swept over the convoy at low altitude. It was a twin, couldn’t see what kind. It dropped a little sack of flour “bomb” right on one of the trucks.
Anyway, I think that was the last war we should have been involved in. Maybe if GWB was 20 years older he would have understood the horror of an all-out war and wouldn’t have gone into Iraq, and we wouldn’t be in such a mess now.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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I just saw on the Weather Channel that after Pearl Harbor the government
made newspapers and radio stations quit giving weather forecasts. They
were allowed to give some temperatures but no wind directions or speeds
or any forecasts. That order was rescinded in '43 when it was clear that
the Homeland wasn't going to be invaded or bombed.
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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Kris let me read a recent book on Midway, sorry forget authors names. It was really detailed with lots of footnotes etc.
Shattered Sword, The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway.
Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully
Regarding the BB's, what I've heard from old navy men and students of the subject is that if our Nevada Class and older ships had tried to engage the Japanese navy, and the Japanese deployed any of their five biggest battleships it would have been, for the Japanese, like shooting ducks in a pond. Our ships big guns were effective out to about 13,000 yards. With larger and more accurate guns, ships like Nagumo and Yamato would have stood off at 30,000 yards and sunk our ships with impunity.
Of course this comparison doesn't factor in naval air power. It's more of a hypothetical battle between the heavy hitters.
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mtnyoung
Trad climber
Twain Harte, California
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...ships like Nagumo and Yamato
Nagumo was an admiral ;)
Musashi and Yamato had 18.1 inch guns.
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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Nagumo was an admiral ;)
Yes sorry, brain fart. Nagato. Even the ships with 41mm (16") guns were good out to 30,000+ yards. The Japanese were quite good at naval artillery.
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Gary
Social climber
Desolation Basin, Calif.
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The Navy weeded out the folks who do good cocktail party.... and found the A%Sholes who could bring it.
"When they get in trouble they send for the sons-of-bitches." -- Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King
There's a good book about the four fleet admirals called The Admirals: Nimitz, Halsey, Leahy, and King--The Five-Star Admirals Who Won the War at Sea.
At Dawn We Slept is a good one for the Japanese admirals and officers. That was a very audacious undertaking, you have to admit.
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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On a tour of the Wisconsin (sister to Missouri shown above), I learned that those turrets extend 4 or 5 decks down into the ship. They sit on giant rollers but are not attached to the ship, so if the ship goes belly up they'll just fall out.
Also, the only way in or out is through a square hatch on the back of the above deck part of the turret. Sailors in the lower levels had no other exit, and there was no access to the turret and its magazines from inside the ship.
Yikes!
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