Monday, December 07, 2009

68 Years Ago, December 7th, 1941

Before:


After:



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5 comments:

Jam Inn said...

American Military Intelligence immediately after the end of WWII, sent a classified cadre of interviewers into Japan to interview every Zero pilot that had survived the Pearl Harbor attack to record the targeting priorities of each pilot. This operation recorded the shocking blunder of the Imperial High Command to not even target/bomb one of the top three strategic targets in the Hawaiian Islands. This 'Top Secret' report has remained classified for decades obscuring this military blunder.

Hugh McBryde said...

I believe one of those three targets, was the fuel dump, that would have been hit in the second wave.

Jam Inn said...

Exactly right, the fuel tanks were not initially targeted, at all in the first wave. Fuel was thee primary target on a strategic list. The Battles of Coral Sea and Midway both occurred within 6 months of Pearl Harbor. Midway is the naval encounter that broke the back of Imperial Japan's Navy and dominance of the Pacific Ocean was lost by them for the duration of the war. Fuel from Hawaii was key to the Battle of Midway and wouldn't have taken place months later, if the fuel reserves had been bombed out.

Hugh McBryde said...

All of those glaring blunders, and then the outright dumb luck of Midway, to me, is the hand of God.

Anyone who reads the account of Midway knows how close we came to losing the war right there.

duaneh1 said...

Actually, our victory at Midway wasn't dumb luck. The Japanese didn't realize we had partially broken their code and assumed our carriers would be at Pearl Harbor.
Because of this, we knew they were targeting midway and our carriers ambushed them while the Japanese carriers had bombs and fuel all over their flight decks.