Today is the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Here’s a short film of part of the actual attack. I don’t have information about its provenance, but it was tweeted by an account I trust, and it looks authentic by a number of markers.
Another anniversary is of President John F. Kennedy’s visit to Los Alamos on December 7, 1962, to be briefed on the Rover nuclear rocket program. With Russia developing a nuclear-powered cruise missile, there’s been renewed interest in the Rover program. It’s interesting to see how much less protection there was for a president back then.
HinTN
And then he went to Dallas.
MattF
My sister was born exactly one year after Pearl Harbor. But her ‘official’ birthday is December 6, because the hospital wouldn’t burden a newborn with the true date.
germy
https://wnyt.com/news/somber-ceremony-recalls-those-killed-in-pearl-harbor-attack/5573086/?cat=10114
jeffreyw
I don’t think I’ve even seen that footage. Interesting seeing a bow wave painted on that large ship. Intended to foil torpedo attacks by fooling them into thinking the forward speed was faster than actual.
germy
After the Pearl Harbor attack, my father went and enlisted in the army.
He fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and ended up as a P.O.W. in a German camp. He told me he was about 98 lbs. when he was finally liberated.
Mike Furlan
The film must be fake. I don’t see any German planes.
japa21
45 years ago today Mrs. Japa said “I do” and we became man and wife. Best day of my life then and still is. We picked this day for two reasons: She felt it would be easier for me to remember and knowing our family members and friends that would be at the wedding, we knew a lot of people would end up bombed.
Visited Pearl Harbor a few years back when we went on a cruise to Hawai’i. In terms of memorable, it was the highpoint of our trip. It is almost impossible to go to the Arizona memorial and read about how sailors who survived the attack have their ashes put into the ship after their deaths so they can be with their fellow shipmates and not have a strong emotional response.
Also, I notice a few Trump loving relatives are posting about it today on FB and basically implying liberals probably don’t even care.
germy
Is it true George H.W. Bush fought in the Pacific because his father didn’t want him in Europe fighting any friends of the family?
Mike in NC
We spent a week in Honolulu back in 2005. Only one week because I’d been offered a new job and the prospective employer wanted me to start as soon as possible. But we managed to take in the tourist attractions: Arizona Memorial, Ford Island, Punchbowl, etc. Also a visit to Schofield Barracks, where my dad was stationed in 1943 before shipping out to Australia.
The battleship shown up top is the USS Nevada, one of few ships to get underway during the attack. The Navy was doing a lot of experimental camouflage studies in 1941, and Nevada was painted with a large exaggerated “bow wave” designed to confuse observers about the actual speed of the ship while underway.
NotMax
@Mike in NC
Kind of related precursor: Dazzle painting in WW1.
PsiFighter37
Speaking of WWII, in the middle of watching the final season of ‘The Man in the High Castle’. There’s a hint of great acting here and there (mainly from Rufus Sewell), but otherwise…it’s a show that started off exceedingly strong and has meandered a bit since season 3. I wish Amazon gave it another season, but alas, the whole streaming TV thing seems to lend to quicker axes than usual.
germy
@Mike in NC:
Is that still done nowadays? Was it proved effective?
LuciaMia
Every year my Mom would recount the same story. She was a teenager, reading in her room. Her father burst in saying, “The Japanese just bombed Pearl Harbor!” She said, “Where’s Pearl Harbor?”
chris
“…anxiety… waiting for the President of the United States.”
Some things never change. But they can get worse.
Thanks, Cheryl, good reminder.
On a lighter note, happy birthday to Tom Waits, 70 years old today.
Boris, Rasputin's Evil Twin
@Mike in NC: The German Navy did paint schemes of this sort. KMS Bismarck had a fake bow wave and stripes to break up her profile. If you like this sort of thing, you’ll love “dazzle paint”, the WWI camouflage that looks like Cubism
NotMax got here first. Good call.
Jay
https://mobile.twitter.com/StratLandpower
Is running a twitter feed on the Pearl Harbour attack,
Major Major Major Major
According to Facebook, it is also the 5-year anniversary of a time I made turkey andouille gumbo from post-thanksgiving stock.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
Another day that will live in infamy.
Martin
@japa21: Congrats! Ms Martin and I only have 26 years under our belt and are determined to see 45 and beyond.
chris
@Major Major Major Major: Let the bells ring out and the banners fly!
Ruckus
@japa21:
Not been to Pearl Harbor.
But I did, unofficially work on a WWII submarine in San Diego, that was set up as a museum of sorts, but was still a commissioned ship. This was 1970 and I was attending a Navy technical school there. Gave tours, it was fun but also a cold reminder of what life was like for those sailors in WWII. The space below the ladder was cleared out so that 6-8 people could fit and most of the people remarked that it was a lot more open than they expected. Then you’d take them through the ship. I’m under 6 ft and weighed about 150 then. And it was tight for me to move and get around. I can not imagine what it must have been like floating in that sardine can of a boat under attack. Any more than I can imagine what it must have been like 78 yrs ago at Pearl Harbor. I floated around for 2 yrs on a smaller ship than the Arizona and being woken up under way in the North Atlantic at 2am by the general quarters alarm was bad enough. All you know for a couple of minutes is something has gone very, very wrong. And you have no idea what it is or what it means to your and your fellow sailors lives. But if it’s bad there is no help out there, it’s just each one of you doing what you’ve been trained to do. And hoping that whatever it is, you survive.
ThresherK
@NotMax: Also kinda related: OMD’s Dazzle Ships
Hey, I’m grazing between several college football games at once, and in the MAC Title game they are kicking FGs from the inside hashmark–the ones aligned directly with the goalposts.
I know Ford Field isn’t a regular college venue, but isn’t that wrong?
Dorothy A. Winsor
I was just talking to a woman whose birthday is Dec. 7. She was a little kid when Pearl Harbor was bombed and was put out because it ruined her birthday. No one paid any attention to her at all.
Martin
@germy: Hard to say if it was effective or not – survivors bias and all that. The military does a lot of tricks like that. I think it was the Canadian Air Force that painted a fake cockpit on the bottom of their planes to make it harder to tell which way a plane was turning. Little things to fool the subconscious.
You wouldn’t do that on a modern ship. Torpedoes don’t run straight like they used to where you’d need to calculate the ships speed, distance and angle of attack, then do the math on the running time of the torpedo and then calculate an intercept. Torpedoes home on their target – you basically just say ‘Go kill that thing’ and then they do. In modern major nation naval warfare, if the other ship can see you, then you’re already pretty much done for if they desire it. Torpedo from a sub or a ship to ship missile. Politics or incompetence on their part is pretty much your only defense.
That’s why we’re building ships that have a small radar signature. Major combat happens over the horizon.
ThresherK
@germy: I imagine it was effective. Today, the use of radar (and even more modern assisted tech stuff) fooling the human eye through binoculars, etc, is not such a necessary tactic.
debbie
NPR interviewed the oldest survivor of the USS Arizona. He is very happy not to be there for the commemoration today.
SiubhanDuinne
7 December 1941… My uncle was at Pearl Harbor, a young officer in a US Army coastal artillery battalion. I believe his men may have shot down at least one Japanese aircraft; you can just see the tail of one In a photograph of one of the buildings. He was lying on his bunk that Sunday morning, just reading a book, when they attacked; he wrote about getting weapons into the hands of his men, and I think my cousin (his son) has some of those documents.
Was interested to learn that apparently there are only three PH survivors, and only one of those three (according to CNN) will make it to this years commemoration.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/06/us/pearl-harbor-survivor-uss-arizona-trnd/index.html#
HumboldtBlue
@germy:
My maternal grandfather, member of the Jersey National Guard, was sent to England in 1941 and didn’t come back to Hasbrouck Heights until 1945. He was a member of the Ghost Army (in fact he was one of the staff officers sent to Washington DC to make the case for funding) which was used to deceive the Germans ahead of the D-Day invasion.
And if you get to Honolulu the Arizona Memorial is well worth the visit.
Dazzle camouflage for those interested.
It originated in WW1 as a means to deceive the enemy range-finders who directed the gunnery.
lee
The planes were flying a lot slower than I expected.
HumboldtBlue
And I’m not much of a Star Trek guy but for those who are, they may enjoy this.
germy
@HumboldtBlue:
That brings back memories. I had family there in the 1960s.
mad citizen
This is color film of the attack–a cool you tube video, I watched it not too long ago:
The Oberg Color Film Footage of Pearl Harbor – December 7, 1941
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b6auSQPvGs
Second Chris’ note of this being Tom Waits 70th birthday!
For me, this is the 40th anniversary of me seeing The Who at the Pontiac Silverdome, 4 days after the Cincinnati tragedy. My ears rang for a week.
BruceJ
The youtube link has all the details, including archive accession numbers, so it is authentic, unless of course, the US government archives are in on the conspiracy: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/76168
debbie
@mad citizen:
Day 14 of waiting for the Waits cover CD to be delivered. Three business days, my ass. ?
Martin
@BruceJ: There’s always been a deep state.
Roger Moore
@germy:
It’s not done today because nobody depends on visual observation to get ship speeds anymore; it’s all done with radar or sonar. Ships today are painted “haze gray”, which is supposed to make them blend in with the horizon. They have all kinds of other passive and active countermeasures to try to foil radar and sonar.
Martin
@lee: Yeah, at the start of the war planes were pretty slow. Around 150MPH cruise speed. Maybe 200 in a bombing dive. Understand, we were basically just rolling out of the wooden biplane stage, with not a lot of demonstrated need for radically better designs.
The Japanese Zero was twice as fast, but couldn’t operate from a carrier. That was a real design challenge early in the war – fast planes generally need longer runways, and carriers are only so big. Plus, fighters were the fast planes as they didn’t need to carry heavy bombs, torpedoes, or the equipment for any kind of bombing precision. Bombers has more of a lifting demand than a speed one. So even by the end of the war, carrier based bombers were still relatively slow cruisers. Dive bombing to reduce the target cross section of the plane and increase its speed making it harder to hit got a lot better and more common as the war went on.
One of the more interesting aspects of the war was aircraft development. In 5 years we went from canvas and wood prop planes at 200 MPH to aluminum clad jets (if not really in production) that could do 700, as well as the dawn of the rocket age (the Nazis were the first to reach space in 1944 with a V2). Lockheed proposed a jet as early as 1940 that to the casual observer would look like something used in Vietnam.
It was horrible of course, but it really illustrates how innovation is driven by necessity. Makes me wonder what we could really be doing if we took climate change as seriously.
Miss Bianca
@mad citizen: I almost went to that show, but my parents were freaked out about the Cincinnati incident and wouldn’t let me.
I don’t remember arguing very strenuously, because even tho’ I adored the Who I wasn’t terribly enamored of huge stadium settings for concerts.
David ??Booooooo?? Koch
Speaking of Pearl Harbor, ? LSU is bombing Georgia
mad citizen
@Miss Bianca: Ha! I was stupid, because even though I was a relatively new glasses wearer, I was also too vain to wear them all the time, so the show was in soft focus for me. I was in the middle of the floor–they played to one end of it from about the 30 yard line I would say, so 40,000 instead of the nearly 80K they had there a few years earlier. There was some pushing toward the stage and Daltrey and Townshend encouraged everyone to take take 3 steps back a few times.
I was a naive college freshman, and went with a friend of mine and 2 older guys he knew. I remember they lit up some pot when we crossed into Michigan, because it was decriminalized there. Now it’s recreationally legal in MI and IL–took long enough! Still waiting in Indiana. Legalize it!
Roger Moore
@Martin:
A lot of this was not military innovation. Almost all this stuff- radar, jets, rockets, computers, etc.- was based on pre-war civilian research. The military took technology that was on the cusp of practicality and put in the development work needed to make it work. That’s not saying that the development was unimportant, but it’s easy to see this stuff as radically new rather than something that was probably on the way, albeit slower, even without the war.
It gets to a point that I hear people make a lot about military development projects. They look at the tech the military has and act as if there’s something unique about military technology. You’ll sometimes people justify our outrageous military spending by arguing that the civilian spin-offs will make it worthwhile. In truth, though, military spending is probably less efficient at generating valuable innovations than civilian spending is. The difference is military spending avoids the political limitations of spending on civilian development. If we took our current military R&D budget and spent it on innovations for civilian technology, we’d get a lot more bang for our buck; it’s just that the conservatives would never stand for it.
The Golux
@mad citizen:
And seven months shy of the fiftieth anniversary of The Who’s performance at Tanglewood, one of the best concerts I’ve ever attended.
Miss Bianca
@mad citizen: ha, luckily the only time I’ve ever busted for possession was in Ann Arbor – all I got was a ticket and a $5 fine.
I well remember people sporting the little buttons that said “$5 is fine by me”!
frosty
@Martin: ”The Japanese Zero was twice as fast, but couldn’t operate from a carrier.”
The Zero was a Navy plane and could definitely fly from a carrier.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_A6M_Zero
chris
@mad citizen: 1979? I was living in a place where there was little or no news of the outside world. So maybe I heard about the “Cincinatti incident” but I don’t remember. What was it?
Ruckus
@SiubhanDuinne:
Anyone old enough to be in the military on that day would be 95 yrs old. A few people make it to 95 and fewer beyond but most of us don’t. I see a few guys at the VA who were in WWII, but there aren’t many left. One I saw a couple of weeks ago looked fitter than his son who had driven him there. 5-6 yrs ago I saw a lot more WWII vets around but they are getting to that time of life.
I want to make it to my 95th birthday if possible, just to say I did. Mom lived longer than anyone in her family and she passed the day before her 95th. I’ve known one person who got over 100, he made 104.
mrmoshpotato
@mad citizen: Not until January 1st.
jeffreyw
@Ruckus:
I’ve outlived my father by a few years, have a ways to go to match Granpa.
Another Scott
@Roger Moore: The biggest difference between military and civilian R&D is the timeline. The military is willing to invest in research that takes 10-30 years to reach fruition, while there isn’t a company like the old Bell Labs or IBM works that is willing to do that any more. Gotta make those quarterly numbers, donchaknow.
Yes, the NSF and NIH is supposed to fund civilian research, and they do, but it’s different – there (generally) isn’t the pressure to have a working widget as a goal.
We need lots more spending on research in lots and lots of areas. (E.g. the DoD uses more fossil fuel for transportation than just about any other organization on the planet, IIRC.)
Cheers,
Scott.
mad citizen
@chris: 11 young concertgoers died in a stampede by the crowd trying to get into the concert hall (the local basketball/hockey arena). The wiki article states the crowd heard either a late soundcheck or the band’s people were playing the Quadrophenia movie as the opening act (I’ve never heard this reason). The concert when on, the band was told after the show. Hell, they even playing the next night in Buffalo, New York. Then Thursday in Cleveland and Friday in Pontiac (Detroit), my show.
There is some video of Roger Daltrey coming back to Cincinnati in recent years, and I think they are both coming back again. It is a devasting incident.
The mania was partly (wholly?) due to the “festival seating” policy of the day, where no one has assigned seats, so everyone lines up and tries to get up front. Ticketing changed for many decades after that, at least in the U.S.
This Rolling Stone article from January 1980 is excellent: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/rock-roll-tragedy-why-11-died-at-the-whos-cincinnati-concert-93437/
I remember getting that one in the mail
The Who just announced they are playing a show in Cincinnati (well 7 miles south–northern Kentucky) on April 23, the first show since the 1979 tragedy
OK, one more link–a recent Cincinnati tv station’s long story that aired this past week, including interviews with Roger and Pete. https://www.wcpo.com/news/the-who-the-night-that-changed-rock/the-who-concert-watch-the-wcpo-documentary-the-who-the-night-that-changed-rock
Kayla Rudbek
And there’s still 500,000 gallons of fuel oil left in the USS Arizona: https://www.nist.gov/nist-time-capsule/nist-beneath-waves/preserving-spirit-mighty-ship-and-environment-around-it
JPL
I mention this every year, but it wasn’t until I was in high school that i found out my dad was on the Nevada that day. After seeing In Harm’s Way, I spoke with my dad about the film and he filled in the rest. My mom didn’t know until X-Mas eve that he was alive and that was a simple post card.
CarolPW
@The Golux: My sister and I were there too! It was astonishing.
Ruckus
@jeffreyw:
Both grandfathers and dad passed at 84. So I’m just thinking…..
My dad would have been 102. I have the advantage and the access of much more modern medicine than they did and it has already told me that I’m not like either of them in important health ways.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Note that the first part of the Pearl video up top is not from the attack; those are American planes coming in to land at Ford.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Kayla Rudbek: You can stand in the memorial and watch the oil leak up.
Barbara
@mad citizen: I was at the show in Pittsburgh, the preceding night, a Sunday. Townsend said something about the Steelers winning today’s game. The tv sitcom set in a radio station Cincinnati did an episode about the tragedy. I vividly remember the Rolling Stone article.
Ruckus
@Kayla Rudbek:
That fuel oil is nasty stuff. It looks, feels and smells like all the do is filter out the rocks after it’s pumped out of the ground. It was nasty, filthy and relatively cheap, but that was it’s only good point. Every 8 hrs steam had to be pumped into the exhaust to clean out the stacks, blowing huge black clouds of soot in the air and then settling on/into the water.
Ship I was on was changed over to jet fuel in Jan 72. Took half the time to refuel, burned something like 1000% cleaner and didn’t have to be heated just to pump it. And we could be refueled by an aircraft carrier, which carried millions of gallons of jet fuel.
chris
@mad citizen: I remember now, thanks. It was talked about but I’d never read anything about it until now. What a tragedy.
SteverinoCT
@JPL: I remember the USS Nevada was Admiral Sims’ baby: the US Navy’s first all-big-gun battleship and despite its age at the time was the only BB to get underway during the attack. He called her the “Cheer-Up Ship.”
Dadadadadadada
@germy: That’s probably too on-the-nose to be true, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if there were some truth to it.
J R in WV
I have a photo of my ship in Subic Bay in 1944, and it is painted in a camo pattern of some sort, no doubt a DoD pattern No. 4928C93 or some such. But no link, and we can’t post pics. I’ll email a copy to Watergirl…
SteverinoCT
@Ruckus:
I’m 5’11.5” and just fit without ducking even on a modern sub. The 688s especially weren’t really designed with people as a priority; I remember one bunk had a fan in it that you just had to sleep around, and another stack of three had a corner cut out to accommodate a ventilation duct. The boomers at least have a bit more room because the missiles meant the hull was wider.
WaterGirl
J R in WV
@WaterGirl:
Thanks WaterGirl.
Lots of hard work, in the sub-tropic weather of FL and MS. I thought the old camo paint job would be appropriate for this thread.
chrome agnomen
@The Golux: the hell you say! i was at both of them. i almost cried for joy at the memory when i returned 50 years later.
WaterGirl
@J R in WV: It’s perfect!
Galahad Threepwood
@The Golux: +1 for the Thirteen Clocks reference! I love that book. ?