All The Gallant Men

I've always enjoyed reading non-fiction more than fiction, if I'm not reading children's books.

I found this one.

It tells the story of a man who survived the bombing of the Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

. It tells his story, the attack, his recovery, his re-enlisting, a synopsis of the war in the Pacific, the atomic bombs, and his take on how the attack could have been prevented.  He’s 94 years old and the guy that wrote up his story did a really good job.  It’s a collaboration effort.

It tells an amazing story.

Lest we forget.

Here are some quotes:

"Don Stratton is one of the last of the greatest generation. Being around him and his wife was a gift, too. Not just the story.  Them.  It felt so good to be able to use my skills as a writer to serve such a man and to tell such a story.  In the process, I was touched by both, the story and the man. 

I am so grateful.  

When I asked what message he would like to leave behind, he said: 'That people would remember Pearl Harbor so that it would never happen again.'  I truly hope Don's story does that."

"We were so young, those of us who enlisted--eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old.  Too young to go through what we endured that day, I can tell you that.  If we were not quite men on December 6, by mid-morning of the 7th we were."

"This is my story. It is just one of the thousands from those who shared that fateful day.  And only on of hundreds of thousands from other sailors, soldiers, and airmen who joined the fight in the fateful days that followed.  But it was mine to live, ....  And now, I figure, it is time to tell it." 

"On the home front, a surge of patriotism filled the country with resolve.  By Sunday evening, after news of the attack was broadcast on radios across the country, phones rang off the hook at the various recruiting stations."

"We were sitting ducks.  Not just the Arizona, but every ship in the harbor.  And there was nothing we could do about it.  The dive bombers were too low for our guns, and, almost two miles above, the horizontal bombers were too high.  With few exceptions, our planes, which the Japanese strategically hit first, never got a chance to get off the ground.  We couldn't even make a run for it into open waters, because it took two and a half hours for the boilers of a battle ship to fire up." 

" 'In an hour,' someone commented, 'boys had become men and men heroes.' That was true not only of the sailors in the harbor but also of the men and women in the hospital.  There were heroics in that hospital that never made the headlines.  People there who would not have a monument erected in their honor.  Who never got a medal for their valor.  Or a promotion for their service.  They were wond of the most heroic people I have ever met.  And I don't even remember their names."

From President Roosevelt's Speech.

"The American people rose of teh occasion, ready to fight.  What Japan had done at Pearl Harbor was despicable in the eyes of every American.  The Japanese had violated every code of honor that had been ingrained in us since childhood.  Since my childhood, anyway.  You didn't sneak up on someone and hit him in the back of the head, without warming. ...and no self-respecting kid did it.  If you had a quarrel with someone, you squared off, the two of you and you diked it out.  You fought with your fists, and you fought fairly.  And you never kicked him while he was down either. You let him get up and defend hiself.  What Japa did in violating our code of honor riled an entire nation. "

In my opinion, war is not fair. Ever.

"In a desperate attempt to half another foreign invasion, they devised a modern version of the Divine Wind*--powered not by the gods of nature but by thousands of young Japanese zealots eager to sacrifice themselves for the emperor.  

The first successful kamikaze attack happened on October 25, 1944, at the battle of Leyte Gulf."

*Japan was saved twice from invasion by strong winds in the 13th Century

"In the sky, kamikaze pilots flew to their deaths as they ravaged the U.S. fleet.  On the land, Japanese soldiers fought to the death rather ran surrender."

"Controversy continues to surround our use of the atomic bomb on  Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For many it is an emotionally charged issue.  No on understands the rawness of those emotions more than the men and women who servied in World War II.  We saw so much.  There were things we didn't talk about when we came home. It was just too horrendous to go back to some of the places we had been.  For those of us who fought and suffered in the war and who saw the horrors of combat, the end of the war couldn't come soon enough."

"Here I should add a postscript for those who think less of America for resorting to such extreme measured.  Before releasing the bomb on Hiroshima, U.S. aircraft dropped leaflets that warmed of the bombing.  Five Million of them. They dropped them on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and thirty-three other cities that were potential targets. The leaflet, printed in Japanese, is translated as follows:

Read this carefully as it may save you life of the life of a relative or friend. In the next few days, some or all of the cities...."   

"Even if you believe America shouldn't have used to atomic bomb on Japan, you should know that we tired nearly everything, short of an invasion, so we would not have to use it.  It was a reluctant last resort.

One more thing you should know...

None of us at Pearl Harbor got leaflets like that from the Japanese."

It also states in the book, and these statistics could be found elsewhere, of tremendous loss of life, some estimated millions, that would have been lost both of Allied and Japanese military and Japanese  civilians during an invasion. As stated earlier, the Japanese soldiers were prepared to fight to the death rather than surrender. 

"Before [General Douglas] MacArther formally accepted Japan's surrender, he made this statement; 'It is my earnest hope--indeed the hope of all mankind--that form this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past, a world founded upon faith and understanding, a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his ost cherished wish for freedom, tolerance and justice."

There is no such thing as security for any nation--or any individual--in a world ruled by the principles of gangsterism.

There is no such things as impregnable defense against powerful aggressors who sneak up in the dark and strike without warning.  

We have learned that our ocean-girt hemisphere is not immune from severe attack--that we cannot measure our safety in terms of miles on any map anymore.

--President Franklin Roosevelt

"Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, and General Walter short, commanding general of the Hawaiian Department, were both found to be in 'dereliction of duty' and were promptly demoted to lesser ranks and retired.  

The buck didn't stop there. As it turned out, there was lots of blame to go around.  Each investigation shed a little more light on who was culpable, and gingers ahve been pointing every since."

"The great lesson we too often learn from history, however, is that we are so prone to forget the past.  And there is a price we pay for our forgetfulness.  

That is why Pearl Harbor matters. It reminds us how we too, are a target, how vulnerable we are, how it could happen again, at a moment when we least expect it."

"Brute force was the native tongue fo the Japanese military.  It was the language they used when they marched across China, when they attacked Pear Harbor without warning, when they overran the islands in the South Pacific."

"... at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel with other officers, enjoying the night's festivities, when the band played, 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' As everyone sand along, he later roucounted that he ahd a terrible urge to jump up and hsout, "Wake up, America!' 

'On December 6, no one on Oahu was more overconfident than the military, ' write historian Thurston Clarke, summarizing the attitude on the eve of December 7. Clarke quotes Richard Sutton, a young ensign attached to Admiral Claude Bloch: "We had the supreme overconfidence a great athlete has who ahs never been beaten--we all thought we were invincible."

"Have some been healed? Yes, Year by merciful, year.  But all? No.  And that is true for so manuy who have survived trauma, not just those who have survived the horror of war."   

Perhaps this is the most important. 

"When I go back to the memorial, I visit to pay my respects. I  have no animosity for the Japanese people.  The Japanese military, well, that's another thing."