I heard a historian and author today describing Pearl Harbor. He said that most of the armed forces men there that day were very young, some as young as 14 because they had lied about their age to get into the Navy or other forces. Quite a few were under 18, and the majority were no more than 24. The officers were older.
When the zeros dropped their bombs and torpedoes setting ships on fire, some of the enlisted men jumped overboard. Those who did not get out of the water immediately by going ashore would all perish when oil and fuel leaking out of the ships floated on the surface of the harbor up to 6 inches deep, and caught fire, making it impossible to live by swimming in the pool of fire.
The air attack first crippled the air fields and with the airports out of commission and the planes destroyed there was no defense, but for three lone American fighter planes that managed to get off the ground because they had been kept on a remote airstrip which the Japanese had missed.
Of over 90 boats that were damaged, only 3 were lost, and remarkably, the rest all were repaired and put back into service within two years, to aid the war effort. One of the larger ships (I forgot the name) capsized, trapping hundreds of enlisted men inside, who died; then a few weeks later the ship was rolled back over and cleaned up. The remains of the bodies of soldiers found inside were collected and set aside for later, and only recently have some of them been identified using DNA analysis. Those bones were sent back to family members who were able to have full military honor funeral services.
Topic: FDR Provoked The Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor (Read 649 times)