Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941

[monty]

One of the Last Living Pearl Harbor Survivors Remembers 'Painful' Day

http://img2.timeinc.net/people/i/2014/news/141222/donald-stratton-800.jpg




Pearl Harbor: WWII Veteran Donald Stratton Remembers the Attack December 7 1941 : People.com


Donald Stratton still can't shake the memory of it all – the deafening explosions, searing heat, machine gun blasts and heart-wrenching screams of his friends – from his head.


"Never a day goes by for all these many years when I haven't thought about it," Stratton, one of nine still-living Pearl Harbor survivors, tells PEOPLE. "I don't talk about it too much, but when December rolls around I do. It's important the American people don't forget."


Now 92, Stratton managed to survive the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, an event that destroyed much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and catapulted the nation into World War II. This past week, Stratton gathered at the naval station near Honolulu with his few remaining comrades to remember and pay homage to the more than 2,500 soldiers who died that day.


"Every time I think back on it," he says, "I just thank the good Lord that I survived and I say a little prayer for the sailors and Marines who didn't make it."


The Beginning


On the morning it happened, Stratton had just left the "chow hall" on the battleship Arizona when he heard a commotion up on the deck. It was a few minutes after 8 a.m. A group of fellow sailors were shouting, pointing out over the water at a cluster of planes.


"I watched one of them bank and saw the rising sun symbol under the wings and thought, 'Boy, that's the Japanese, and they're bombing us,' " he says.


Within seconds, the 19-year-old Nebraskan scrambled 60 feet up a series of ladders and joined a group of other sailors manning a five-inch, 25-caliber anti-aircraft gun.


"We were just firing away at all those planes," he recalls. "They were coming in so close I could see the pilots when they went by. Some were waving and some were grinning."


Their Ship Is Hit


In the harbor around him, ships were ablaze and black smoke blanketed the sky as Japanese bombers circled high overhead. Suddenly, the ship was rocked by a bomb blast so powerful it lifted the 32,000-ton battleship six feet out of the water.


"A 600-foot fireball just engulfed us, burning all of us real bad," says Stratton, whose flesh literally slid off his arms. "After that it was all about self-preservation, buddy. We weren't thinking about anything but getting the hell off of there."


Fire raged all around him as a sailor from another ship managed to toss a rope to the trapped men that they secured and stretched between the two vessels. One after another, Stratton and five other men muscled their way, hand over hand, across 100 feet of rope as the fuel-coated water beneath them burned.


"My hands were burned so badly I don't have any fingerprints," Stratton says, "so it was pretty painful."


By the end of the day, 1,177 of his crew mates were dead. He spent the next 10 months in a series of military hospitals, recovering from the burns that covered almost 70 percent of his body. A year after his medical discharge from the Navy, Stratton, who was still recuperating at home, marched back into a military recruiting office to announce that he wanted back in the war.


"People were saying, 'What the hell did you do that for? Didn't you get enough?' " Stratton says. "But I wanted to go back out to sea. Besides, there wasn't much to do in Nebraska."


Before long, he was a gunner's mate on the destroyer USS Stack, participating in the invasions of New Guinea, the Philippines and Okinawa.


http://img2.timeinc.net/people/i/2014/news/141222/donald-stratton-2.jpgDonald Stratton (far right)
Credit: Courtesy Donald Stratton




Life Since the War


Over seven decades have passed since the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Stratton still carries the scars – both physical and psychological – from that nightmarish morning. "Any sharp noise like a phone ringing causes me to jump three feet in the air," he says.


But what truly disturbs and saddens Stratton is the way the "date which will live in infamy," as President Franklin D. Roosevelt described it in his speech to Congress the next day, is slowly being forgotten.


"They don't even teach about it in many schools anymore," he laments. "But anyone who doesn't think it's important should have been there with me that morning at the end of one of those guns, shooting at the enemy. I think that would change anybody's mind."


http://www.people.com/article/pearl-harbor-veteran-remembers-december-7-1941

(http://www.people.com/article/louis-zamperin-unbroken-exclusive-featurette)

[monty]

Within seconds, the 19-year-old Nebraskan scrambled 60 feet up a series of ladders and joined a group of other sailors manning a five-inch, 25-caliber anti-aircraft gun.

That must be a misprint. 25 caliber anti-aircraft gun. Could it be 25 mm? That would be about a 1" diameter bullet.

[Glass]

That must be a misprint. 25 caliber anti-aircraft gun. Could it be 25 mm? That would be about a 1" diameter bullet.[/FONT][/COLOR]

Anti aircraft guns/calibers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anti-aircraft_guns

According to that the US had 1/2", 20mm, 40mm, 75mm and up.

[EE_]

How U.S. Economic Warfare Provoked Japan’s Attack on Pearl Harbor
By Robert Higgs | Posted: Mon. May 1, 2006

Ask a typical American how the United States got into World War II, and he will almost certainly tell you that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the Americans fought back. Ask him why the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and he will probably need some time to gather his thoughts. He might say that the Japanese were aggressive militarists who wanted to take over the world, or at least the Asia-Pacific part of it. Ask him what the United States did to provoke the Japanese, and he will probably say that the Americans did nothing: we were just minding our own business when the crazy Japanese, completely without justification, mounted a sneak attack on us, catching us totally by surprise in Hawaii on December 7, 1941.

You can’t blame him much. For more than 60 years such beliefs have constituted the generally accepted view among Americans, the one taught in schools and depicted in movies—what “every schoolboy knows.” Unfortunately, this orthodox view is a tissue of misconceptions. Don’t bother to ask the typical American what U.S. economic warfare had to do with provoking the Japanese to mount their attack, because he won’t know. Indeed, he will have no idea what you are talking about.

In the late nineteenth century, Japan’s economy began to grow and to industrialize rapidly. Because Japan has few natural resources, many of the burgeoning industries had to rely on imported raw materials, such as coal, iron ore or steel scrap, tin, copper, bauxite, rubber, and petroleum. Without access to such imports, many of which came from the United States or from European colonies in southeast Asia, Japan’s industrial economy would have ground to a halt. By engaging in international trade, however, the Japanese had built a moderately advanced industrial economy by 1941.

At the same time, they also built a military-industrial complex to support an increasingly powerful army and navy. These armed forces allowed Japan to project its power into various places in the Pacific and east Asia, including Korea and northern China, much as the United States used its growing industrial might to equip armed forces that projected U.S. power into the Caribbean and Latin America, and even as far away as the Philippine Islands.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933, the U.S. government fell under the control of a man who disliked the Japanese and harbored a romantic affection for the Chinese because, some writers have speculated, Roosevelt’s ancestors had made money in the China trade. Roosevelt also disliked the Germans (and of course Adolf Hitler), and he tended to favor the British in his personal relations and in world affairs. He did not pay much attention to foreign policy, however, until his New Deal began to peter out in 1937. Afterward, he relied heavily on foreign policy to fulfill his political ambitions, including his desire for reelection to an unprecedented third term.

When Germany began to rearm and to seek Lebensraum aggressively in the late 1930s, the Roosevelt administration cooperated closely with the British and the French in measures to oppose German expansion. After World War II commenced in 1939, this U.S. assistance grew ever greater and included such measures as the so-called destroyer deal and the deceptively named Lend-Lease program. In anticipation of U.S. entry into the war, British and U.S. military staffs secretly formulated plans for joint operations. U.S. forces sought to create a war-justifying incident by cooperating with the British navy in attacks on German U-boats in the north Atlantic, but Hitler refused to take the bait, thus denying Roosevelt the pretext he craved for making the United States a full-fledged, declared belligerent—an end that the great majority of Americans opposed.

In June 1940, Henry L. Stimson, who had been secretary of war under Taft and secretary of state under Hoover, became secretary of war again. Stimson was a lion of the Anglophile, northeastern upper crust and no friend of the Japanese. In support of the so-called Open Door Policy for China, Stimson favored the use of economic sanctions to obstruct Japan’s advance in Asia. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes vigorously endorsed this policy. Roosevelt hoped that such sanctions would goad the Japanese into making a rash mistake by launching a war against the United States, which would bring in Germany because Japan and Germany were allied.

Accordingly, the Roosevelt administration, while curtly dismissing Japanese diplomatic overtures to harmonize relations, imposed a series of increasingly stringent economic sanctions on Japan. In 1939 the United States terminated the 1911 commercial treaty with Japan. “On July 2, 1940, Roosevelt signed the Export Control Act, authorizing the President to license or prohibit the export of essential defense materials.” Under this authority, “In July 31, exports of aviation motor fuels and lubricants and No. 1 heavy melting iron and steel scrap were restricted.” Next, in a move aimed at Japan, Roosevelt slapped an embargo, effective October 16, “on all exports of scrap iron and steel to destinations other than Britain and the nations of the Western Hemisphere.” Finally, on July 26, 1941, Roosevelt “froze Japanese assets in the United States, thus bringing commercial relations between the nations to an effective end. One week later Roosevelt embargoed the export of such grades of oil as still were in commercial flow to Japan.” The British and the Dutch followed suit, embargoing exports to Japan from their colonies in southeast Asia.


An Untenable Position

Roosevelt and his subordinates knew they were putting Japan in an untenable position and that the Japanese government might well try to escape the stranglehold by going to war. Having broken the Japanese diplomatic code, the Americans knew, among many other things, what Foreign Minister Teijiro Toyoda had communicated to Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura on July 31: “Commercial and economic relations between Japan and third countries, led by England and the United States, are gradually becoming so horribly strained that we cannot endure it much longer. Consequently, our Empire, to save its very life, must take measures to secure the raw materials of the South Seas.”
Because American cryptographers had also broken the Japanese naval code, the leaders in Washington knew as well that Japan’s “measures” would include an attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet they withheld this critical information from the commanders in Hawaii, who might have headed off the attack or prepared themselves to defend against it. That Roosevelt and his chieftains did not ring the tocsin makes perfect sense: after all, the impending attack constituted precisely what they had been seeking for a long time. As Stimson confided to his diary after a meeting of the war cabinet on November 25, “The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.” After the attack, Stimson confessed that “my first feeling was of relief ... that a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people.
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1930

[Neuro]

Anti aircraft guns/calibers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anti-aircraft_guns

According to that the US had 1/2", 20mm, 40mm, 75mm and up.
According to that list US had what was called 5"/25 caliber anti-aircraft gun during WWII. Measuring 127 mm ø

[gunDriller]

Unique Hawaiian history & culture at work ...

Dec. 6
Big Surf Contest at Jaws


Dec. 7
Commemoration of attack by FDR & Japan ... "move the new boats out into deeper waters"


Dec. 8
Bigger Surf Contest at Pipeline

[palani]

A 5 inch 38 is a gun with a 5 inch bore and a rifle length 38 times the bore diameter .. or 190 inches long.

A 3 inch 50 is a 3 inch bore with a 150 inch barrel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5%22/25_caliber_gun

The 5 inch 25 had a 5 inch bore and 125" barrel.