Pearl Harbor day.......

[Sisyphus]

Would any of you tell the orphans, widows and parents who lost their children only 10 years ago that we just need to drop it? To get over it? Bullshit.

How they feel is none of my business, but I'd tell everyone else to stop using 9/11 to justify the end of individual rights at home and bathing in blood abroad.

This.

[Pintgudge]

Get over it, no.

It is pretty much impossible to actually find the true and correct person or persons to blame however, and most people who carry this cause with everlasting hate do so blaming the wrong folks.

I personally have better things to do with my life than spend years commemorating a wrong.

It is harder to do, but I'll try to do a right instead.

[12ci]

because

[DerGolgo]

And the "boy, THAT is an ancient thread to show up with the blue icon!" cup goes to this.

Fuck war. The only thing that is worse than war is the shits who start wars.
America, at the time, showed the world how this works.
Don't start wars. But if somebody else does, you END them.

Some say that, after the Japanese occupation of Korea, war in the Pacific was pretty inevitable. That they figured they had to attack the US fleet, or the US would attack them.
I don't want to imagine the shit the US sailors, soldiers and civilians in Pearl Harbor went through that day. Or went through in the years following, dealing with injuries to the body and the mind.
Before Pearl Harbor, the fascists were winning. Lend lease alone didn't do the trick. The turn on the Ostfront didn't come until early 1943, by which time the USSR was getting war materials etc. from the US. As crucially, the things the Wehrmacht there didn't get. Not even because the factories were reduced to rubble by one bombing raid after the other. The bombs that rained down never achieved as much as anyone hoped. The guns that would shoot at the planes dropping the bombs, though. As Speer himself put it after the war: "Can you imagine what we could have done with all those 88mm tubes on the Ostfront?". Even when the guy was befuddled by the allied interrogators amazement that war-production was affected as little as it was by the bombings, there had been only so many rolling-mills, so many reserves of transition-metals for alloys. So shells from lesser guns would keep bouncing off of T-34s. Many, many things like that, the fascists hadn't even been able to conceive, as amazed as they had been with themselves.
75 years ago today, they started losing the war. Convinced that one "decisive" battle, one they couldn't possibly lose, would let them sweep those weak, democratic people aside.
I'm kinda conflicted about remembering that.

I'm absolutely not conflicted about what the Japanese did that day, or about who won the war.

[Jaeger]

because

Nicely done, sir.

"Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it; those who do study history are doomed to sit by and watch others repeat it."

Fuck war. The only thing that is worse than war is the shits who start wars.
America, at the time, showed the world how this works.
Don't start wars. But if somebody else does, you END them.

...

I'm absolutely not conflicted about what the Japanese did that day, or about who won the war.

"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."
--Admiral Yamamoto (debatable)

To all those old bastards what fought WW2... I pray that we've learned the lessons your blood taught us so dearly. Cheers.

--Jaeger

[Skkot]

One memorial day, a local class of elementary school students wrote letters to local veterans, and my dad received one. He had been stationed in Germany in 1954, just in time to be considered to be part of the occupation. He was asked if anyone had tried to kill him, and he responded that because his uncles went to war and won, Germany was peaceful when he was there and people were friendly.

His mother had three brothers; the oldest (Alfred) had served in the Marines as an aviator during the 1920's and had deployed to Nicauragua. He volunteered for the Army Air Corps but was too old at 35 to be a pilot. They made him a radio operator in a B-17. The middle brother (Jerome) was in an armored division and saw combat in North Africa. The youngest (Robbie), 8 years older than my dad and more like a big brother than an uncle, volunteered for Airborne Infantry.

The uncle who fought in a tank was sent home in 1944 under the sole surviving son rule. Albert was killed on January 3, 1943 bombing the submarine pens at St. Nazaire, France. Robbie was killed jumping into Normandy. I read letters from my grandfather to the War Department asking where Albert was buried. Several times they informed him where Robert was buried, but it took a few years to locate Alfred.

It's true there has been plenty of evil done throughout history by all people and no-one really is innocent, but if Alfred and Robbie had survived the war, not only would I have probably gotten to know or at least meet Robert (he was why I went Airborne when it was my turn to volunteer) but Dozer and I likely would have had several more cousins. That's not nationalistic or triumphalist, but that's the reality we are left with and why we still remember or think about remembering because the consequences remain. At least we don't have buried ordnance everywhere.

[motorpsycho67]

12-7-80
RIP Jan Paul Beahm