Quotes About Pearl Harbor

our strategy must be to antagonize them into striking the first blow, the classic 'Pearl Harbor' maneuver of game theory, a great advantage in Weltpolitick.

On the day Rome fell, that great American Army numbered eight million soldiers, a fivefold increase since Pearl Harbor. It included twelve hundred generals and nearly 500,000 lieutenants. Half the Army had yet to deploy overseas, but the U.S. military already had demonstrated that it could wage global war in several far-flung theaters simultaneously, a notion that had "seemed outlandish in 1942," as the historian Eric Larrabee later wrote.

merchantman sunk in the Atlantic, the 500th U.S. ship lost to U-boats since Pearl Harbor. The domestic news was also war-related, if less febrile: the first meatless Tuesday had gone well in New York; penitentiary inmates with only one felony conviction were urged to apply for parole so they could serve in the Army; and a survey of department stores in Washington revealed that "there aren't any nylon stockings to be had for love or money.

Unlike what happened after Pearl Harbor, however, the Bush administration would not order a "review of how they could have been so badly surprised" because the results would have shown "a colossal bureaucratic failure, combined with inattention and a lack of political will at the top.

Our military thought that they couldn't get to Pearl Harbor, that it was too long a journey from Japan to get there, and they proved us wrong.

Japanese naval officers in dress whites are frequent guests at Pearl Harbor's officers' mess and are very polite. They always were. Except, of course, for that little interval there between 1941 and 1945.

Pearl Harbor caused our Nation to wholeheartedly commit to winning World War II, changing the course of our Nation's history and the world's future.

September 11, 2001 turned out to be that "Pearl Harbor event" the neoconservatives were hoping for in order to prepare the American people to support the foreign policy for which the neocons longed.

No time back then or since has there been much discussion of the significance of Roosevelt's executive order on July 26, 1941 that froze all Japanese assets in the US. This occurred four months before Pearl Harbor. It essentially created an oil embargo on the Japanese. Such sanctions are a deeply flawed policy that we continue to use today, to our detriment.

Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision

I have to chuckle sometimes when I am painted as "hard-nosed." In truth, our Justice Department wasn't nearly as aggressive as Roosevelt's. And our respect for civil liberties was far more extensive than the response following Pearl Harbor. Yes, we were tough, but we always operated within the law; it was never our policy or practice to detain any noncombatant without charges. In our conduct, we never approached the limits of the law as closely as Roosevelt did.

Ellis M. Zacharias had been wartime deputy chief of the Office of Naval Intelligence, on whose records his book and the radio show were based. The stories ranged from the home front (ONI agents tracking Japanese activity on the West Coast prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor) to germ warfare (Nazi plans to infect Paris with plague as liberating armies arrived in 1944).

Before the war, my parents were very proud people. They'd always talk about Japan and also about the samurai and things like that. Right after Pearl Harbor, they were just real quiet. They kept to themselves; they were afraid to talk about what could happen. I assume they knew that nothing good would come out of it.

But in 1941, on December 8th, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, my mother bought a radio and we listened to the war news. We'd not had a radio up to that time. I was born in 1934, so I was seven years of age.

Richard M. Helms, the first director of Central Intelligence to rise from the ranks, was fond of saying that the CIA had been founded to make sure that there would never be another Pearl Harbor. Underlying this mission impossible was the wishful supposition that an America that knew everything could prevent anything.

My cooking is so bad my kids thought Thanksgiving was to commemorate Pearl Harbor.

The roots of a future war were planted that fateful spring; Wilson's failure to support Japan's highest aspirations would end with bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor.

Some calamities - the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - have come like summer lightning, as bolts from the blue. The looming crisis of America's Ponzi entitlement structure is different. Driven by the demographics of an aging population, its causes, timing and scope are known.

When reflecting upon it today, that the Pearl Harbor attack should have succeeded in achieving surprise seems a blessing from Heaven. It was clear that a great American fleet had been concentrated in Pearl Harbor, and we supposed that the state of alert would be very high.

I mean, if Pearl Harbor came along, you could have said the planning was wrong by the military ahead of time or maybe the battleships shouldn't have all been in the harbor and all that kind of thing.

President Roosevelt provoked the Japanese to attack us at Pearl Harbor.

I was four years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941 by Japan, and overnight, the world was plunged into a world war. America suddenly was swept up by hysteria.

Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, isolationism was an important, even dominant strand in U.S. politics. After the Second World War, this strand disappeared, smothered by the widespread and bipartisan conviction that the United States needed to stay engaged with the world to prevent future crises.

History demonstrates that previous military drawdowns invited aggression by our enemies. After World War I, America drew down forces until the U.S. Army had fewer than 100,000 men in uniform. That weakness invited Nazi aggression in Europe and the imperial Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor.