71 Years Ago – Pearl Harbor Attacked
At 6:00 a.m. on December 7, 1941, six Japanese carriers launched a first wave of 183 planes composed of torpedo bombers, dive-bombers, level bombers and fighters. The Japanese hit American ships and military installations at 7:53 a.m. This attack brought the United States into World War II.
They attacked military airfields and at the same time they hit the fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor. The attack might have been averted if vital intelligence information was passed to the Navy commander Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Army commander Walter Short.
Twenty-one ships of the U.S. Pacific fleet were damaged and the death toll reached 2,403 with 1,178 injured.
Emperor Misha I at The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler says it far better than I could :
“I’ll remember and honor those who died on and after Pearl Harbor.
I’ll remember those who didn’t respond to Pearl Harbor with a cry of “why do they hate us?”
I’ll remember the generation that took a savage beating over and over again on battlefields all over the world, only to get back up, dust themselves off, grit their teeth and get back in the fight because “it ain’t over ’till it’s over, no matter what it takes.”
I’m grateful to you for keeping up the fight until the end. I’m grateful to you for NOT responding to the opening of the Battle of the Bulge with screams of “quagmire” and demands for exit strategies and redeployment over the horizon.
I’m grateful that your response to Iwo Jima WASN’T to establish a Japan Study Group with the task of figuring out the best way of surrendering to the Axis.”
Post Updated 12/07/08
An Angeleno's View of the World 
A date that will live in infamy… I remember that my son graduated from USMC basic training on the 50th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. There were uniformed veterans there in remembrance of the attack. The last of a dying breed, and we are losing them at a rate of approximately 2,000 per day. It will be a sad day indeed when the last of them has passed on.
It is not my intent to make light of the heroes of today. Every generation has its heroes. The difference between the heroes of ‘then’ and the heroes of ‘today’ is the quantity… and of a nation that stood behind them with all their hearts and minds.