It was on December 7th, 1941 that 353 Japanese bombers attacked

[elleng]

the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, destroying 19 ships, 188 aircraft and killing over 2,000 Americans. ... It was this act that drove the United States into World War II.

[KS Toronado]

1. 80 years, I think about it every Dec 7th.

[LT Barclay]

2. And remember that if it wasn't for the most liberal president ever, Europe would have already been

overrun and we would have been caught off guard.
If republicans at the time would have had their way we would not be the United States and would probably be an eastern German speaking colony with Mexico given the southwest and the Japanese the Pacific coast (conjecture of course).

Anyway, you can remember December 7th by asking your republican family, friends, and aquaintances "when was the last time a republican president led us to victory in a war?"

[vercetti2021]

7. Essentially Man in the High Castle scenario

If President Roosevelt got assassinated, then we would haven't had the New Deal and we would have had a depression most likely still, thus it would have been easy to invade us due to the weak economics we would have still had. Essentially how the Nazi's were about to Nuke DC in the show. A lot of scare alternative timelines we could be living right now

[sarisataka]

9. It may have been possible due

To a weak US economy but still would have been impossible due to logistics.

OTH if the US was still in a depression Japan may not have viewed an economically weak America as a threat so would not have attacked Pearl Harbor.

[Demovictory9]

3. ...

[No Vested Interest]

4. I remember that day - my father coming into the kitchen,

telling my mother and me -"The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor."

[elleng]

5. WOW!

(that you remember.) I wasn't born @ the time.

Dad ended up serving @ Pearl, as a legal officer for the Navy.

[No Vested Interest]

6. I had just turned 6 yrs old.

[panader0]

8. When I was in junior high and high school in Hawaii, I lived on Hickam AFB,

where my dad was stationed. I lived about 200 feet from the entrance to Pearl Harbor. When the ships came in
or out, I could plainly see them over the roofs of the houses across the street. My buddy and I occasionally
paddled our surf boards across the entrance for the waves on the other side. The building my dad worked
at still had the damage from the Japanese planes, left on purpose as a reminder.
One of the girls at my school lived on Ford island in the middle of the harbor. She had a few parties, and to
get there you had to be ferried across by sailors. I got drunk for the first time there.
The Arizona memorial is quite striking and there are many tourists every day. Overall, Pearl Harbor is
beautiful and a wonderful natural harbor.

[sarisataka]

10. An amazingly bold plan

Aided by intelligence failures and some good luck that ultimately led to the death of the man who planned it.

Funny how history repeats.

[Ex Lurker]

11. The previous summer, the Louisiana Maneuvers were held

a massive training exercise involving tens of thousands of troops. My grandfather was the principal of a small rural school. He lived in a house on the school grounds with his family, including my then six year old father. During the maneuvers, a federalized national guard unit from Pennsylvania camped at the school. My father's family befriended some of them and kept up a correspondence afterward, including when they shipped out for the Phillipines. The letters stopped after Pear Harbor and they never heard from any of them again. It's doubtful any survived Japanese captivity.

[Journeyman]

12. My father enlisted the next day. A senior in high school, he withdrew to start training Jan. 2nd...

He was a strong liberal, great admirer of President Roosevelt, and he didn't give a second thought about leaving school and family to fight in the Navy.

He spent the next four years on a destroyer in the Pacific Theater. He received the Silver Star in the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. Later that day, his ship escorted the damaged USS Juneau; engineers from his vessel were onboard to help the crippled cruiser make repairs when an enemy torpedo broke it in two. It sank in 20 seconds, with all the attendant horror that came to light weeks later.

What all my Father saw and what he did died with him at an early age. He never fit into society again. He drank himself to death, haunted by the past.

It was a bastard war filled with black moments and unrestrained hatreds on every side, and it was set in motion 80 years ago today.

[DFW]

13. I knew veterans on both sides of that war.

I think of how two of them grew up--one a Harvard student who had to graduate early in order to make his draft notice, the other a farmer drafted as cannon fodder into the Wehrmacht at age 17, and sent to die at Stalingrad. Each was told that what they were doing was to defend their country's safety and its future. It's amazing that two soldiers on opposing sides became friends and saw their children marry and make the families into one big one.

Had they been deployed under different circumstances, they might not even have spoken to each other. Fate tells a different story every time.

Hermann Göring, one of Hitler's closest pals and boss of his Luftwaffe, was frank in an interview in his cell at Nürnberg: "“Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?" My father-in-law WAS that "slob on a farm." He didn't want any part of war, and he did NOT come back to his farm in one piece.

It's always easier to talk of nations, armies and events than it is of individual stories. They are often so shocking and horrible that some of those affected bury their memories somewhere deep and inaccessible, because their lives would be unlivable if they didn't.