Original Day of Infamy--70 Years Ago Today

[wmenorr67]

Great story on survivors that want to serve eternity with shipmates.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/12/07/pearl-harbor-survivors-return-to-ships-after-death/

Hard to imagine that before long these great men will no longer be with us.  My grandfather is a WWII Navy vet and is 89 (I think) and doesn't have many years left.

Sad that if this part of history is even taught anymore it is nothing more than a side note.

[T.O.M.]

Great story on survivors that want to serve eternity with shipmates.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/12/07/pearl-harbor-survivors-return-to-ships-after-death/

Hard to imagine that before long these great men will no longer be with us.  My grandfather is a WWII Navy vet and is 89 (I think) and doesn't have many years left.

Sad that if this part of history is even taught anymore it is nothing more than a side note.

It is our moral obligation as the sons/grandsons and daughters/granddaughters of these veterans to tell their stories to our sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters as well, so that the deeds, the acts, and the sacrifices of the men and women who served won't be forgotten

[wmenorr67]

It is our moral obligation as the sons/grandsons and daughters/granddaughters of these veterans to tell their stories to our sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters as well, so that the deeds, the acts, and the sacrifices of the men and women who served won't be forgotten

No disagreement.

[Perd Hapley]

Huh? WWII history is one of the few bits people DO know about, and Pearl Harbor is one of the best-known incidents of it.

[wmenorr67]

Huh? WWII history is one of the few bits people DO know about, and Pearl Harbor is one of the best-known incidents of it.

Maybe of our generation fistful, but ask the generation in High School today and the ones in college and see how much the know about it.

I just asked a 28 year old guy in my section today if he knew what the significance of today was.  Crickets and deer in the headlight look.

[InfidelSerf]

Crickets and deer in the headlight look.

Actually if you ask them about Pearl Harbor they will mostly likely say something about
Ben Afleck, Cuba Gooding Jr, jacka## Baldwin   etc

You are right, it is our obligation to ensure the REAL story of our history is preserved and passed on.
We seem to enjoy repeating much of it. 

[Perd Hapley]

I just asked a 28 year old guy in my section today if he knew what the significance of today was.  Crickets and deer in the headlight look.

And?

[Jamie B]

Looks like somebody needs pictures.

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

28 years ago today i married wife 1.1   a date that will live in infamy

[Monkeyleg]

28 years ago today i married wife 1.1   a date that will live in infamy

It might have been less stressful to have been at Pearl Harbor.

With every passing year, December 7th loses its meaning even more.

[Jamie B]

It might have been less stressful to have been at Pearl Harbor.

With every passing year, December 7th loses its meaning even more.

I used to work for a Japanese Honda supplier. December 7th was a tense day all around.
I asked one of the older Japanese about Pearl Harbor, and he literally hung his head in shame when talking about it.
It was also very tense on August 6th and 9th, the dates when we dropped the atomic bombs.
Some older folks have never forgiven the Japanese for Pearl Harbor at all, and are still quite angry to this day.
Strange times those were.....

[lee n. field]

It might have been less stressful to have been at Pearl Harbor.

With every passing year, December 7th loses its meaning even more.

The recent Robert Heinlein biography (I don't have to explain to you people who he was, right?) recounts an interesting tidbit about Pearl Harbor.

It seems, back in his active Navy days, young Robert took part in a naval war game.  This would be somewhere in the 1928 to 1932 time frame.  Two teams, one on land, to defend Pearl Harbor from attack.  One at sea, to attempt an aerial attack.

The attack team won.  The Pearl Harbor runway was bombed with sacks of white flour.

The lesson our Navy officially took from it was "Eh, we're OK."  The Japanese also paid attention.

[Monkeyleg]

That's really a remarkable story. So the Japanese were paying attention to our practice.

[Jamie B]

That's really a remarkable story. So the Japanese were paying attention to our practice.

Yes, they are. They are the great watchers.
Remember that they are good at running with the ideas of others; lousy at being innovators.

[T.O.M.]

When I visited Pearl Harbor, I noticed that there were manu Asian/Japanese tourists who visited the Arizona memorial, but very few went to visit The Missouri 200 yards away.  I'll leave speculation as to why to all of you... 

[Perd Hapley]

If some of you think the attack on Pearl Harbor is lapsing into obscurity, how about Vicksburg, Chickamauga, the Gulf of Tonkin? We've talked about Leyte Gulf here before. You'd get some serious blank stares about that one, out there in the world, probably even among older people. I know I've never heard anyone talk about it outside of this board.

[French G.]

On the Japanese watching us, they did signal intelligence on our naval gunnery practice which was easy since there was no encryption. They knew rather accurately pre-war what our naval gunfire capabilities were until.... we got radar. Oops.

[MicroBalrog]

The recent Robert Heinlein biography (I don't have to explain to you people who he was, right?) recounts an interesting tidbit about Pearl Harbor.

It seems, back in his active Navy days, young Robert took part in a naval war game.  This would be somewhere in the 1928 to 1932 time frame.  Two teams, one on land, to defend Pearl Harbor from attack.  One at sea, to attempt an aerial attack.

The attack team won.  The Pearl Harbor runway was bombed with sacks of white flour.

The lesson our Navy officially took from it was "Eh, we're OK."  

If there's anything I learned it's that groups - such as military organizations -are often lousier learners than individuals. Something may be well-known by individuals in a military establishment, and sometimes even commonly known - but the system as a group fails to take the lesson.

[lee n. field]

If there's anything I learned it's that groups - such as military organizations -are often lousier learners than individuals. Something may be well-known by individuals in a military establishment, and sometimes even commonly known - but the system as a group fails to take the lesson.

The relevant section:

The US Navy's war games continued, the Pacific Fleet splitting into Blue and Black teams to run a simulated Japanese attach on Oahu.  The Blacks defended and the Blues invaded.  Lexington was in the Blue force; her sister aircraft carrier, Saratoga, carried the Admiral's flag for aircraft, commanded by Admiral Yarnell.  

Japan now had the third-stongest Navy in the world, after the US and Britain.  The US Navy had begun reevaluating the shipping and bases in the Pacific.  The Naval War College had evolved a war scenario called "Plan Orange" (which must have been the scenario Heinlein was briefed on while still at Annapolis).  The Plan Orange scenario was based on the idea of a surprise attack -- a favorite Japanese tactic that could produce devastating losses on the enemy.  Plan Orange anticipated a surprise attack against Pearl Harbor, launched from aircraft carriers.  Lexington and Saratoga ranged ahead of its battleship support and prepared to launch an air attack against Pearl.

Everyone has assumed the carriers would be detected and "sunk" by Black submarines or land-based planes long before they could get within range to launch their planes, but Saratoga evaded the Black patrol planes and came in northeast of Oahu in rain and squally winds.  Once they launched their planes, the weather would carry them directly to Oahu; the pilots could roar through the rain clouds and burst into clear, sunny weather over Pearl Harbor ... on Sunday morning, February 7, 1932.

Heinlein was scheduled to go up with Buck Brandley in a T4M as an observer for the attack

...3/4 page of stuff not relevant to this...

Brandley and Heinlein's T4M went up in a combined launch of 152 planes from the Saratoga and the Lexington.  An hour later, the planes came out of the storm front over the Koolau Range and into clear air over Pearl Harbor, where they "strafed" lines of planes parked on runways.  The dive-bombers dumped twenty tons of theoretical explosives on airfields, ships in the anchorage, the Army headwaters at Fort Shafter, Schofield Barracks, and Hickham Field.  It was a complete surprise: not a single fighter plane was launched from Pearl that morning.  It was twenty-four hours before the Black group even located them.  They got Yarnell's flag a few days later when Saratoga was "bombed" from the air and ruled damaged by the Referee, Admiral Schofield.

At the postmortem critique conducted on the Grand Joint Exercise No. 4, on February 18, 1932, Admiral Yarnell argued that the successful attack on Pearl Harbor meant the Navy should reevaluate American naval tactics -- but he was voted down by the majority of battleship admirals.  The final report's conclusion was exactly the reverse of the actual experience:

is doubtful if air attacks can be launched against Oahu in the face of strong defensive aviation without subjecting the attacking carriers to the danger of material damage and consequent great losses in the attack air force

If the lesson was lost on the US Navy, Japanese observers filed a thorough report on the attack.  This report would form the basis for the 1936 recommendation for surprise attack against Pearl Harbor made in the Japan Navy War College's "Study of Strategy and Tactics in Operations against the United States."

---Robert Heinlein, In Dialog With His Century, Wm. H. Patterson, Jr.  2010, page 149-151