As I write, the clock is marking the hours toward the 75th Anniversary of the Air Raid that changed history. The destroyer USS Ward (DD-139) had already engaged a Japanese mini-submarine outside the nets that guarded Pearl Harbor; Japanese carrier pilots were briefing their strike packages and preparing to launch from the decks of resolute warships standing into harm’s way. It is a day that always carried significance to those of us who worked in the Harbor, and particularly in the days when Ford Island’s connection to the mainland was the jaunty little Ford Island Ferry.
From the landing on Mainside, the course to the island took us abeam the memorial that guards the tomb of the USS Arizona (BB-39). It was hard to complain about standing a watch on a Sunday when the grim realization of what could happen on a placid tropical morning slid by, still oozing fuel oil from the bunkers that were topped up on that awful day. Seventy-five years ago at this minute, Arizona was just wakening from her liberty-induced slumber, the chaplain was preparing his homily, and in less than two hours most of her crew would be dead, and the proud ship would be on the bottom of the harbor, masts askew and her superstructure in flames.
I have been going on in the last few days about what happened to CDR Joe Rochefort after his team of code-breakers caught the Japanese unaware, and Admiral Chester Nimitz was able to inflict the most devastating defeat on a nautical enemy since Trafalgar.
The thing that bugged Mac all his life was the shabby treatment then inflicted on the leader of the team that made the victory possible. I will get to all of it, presently, but for today, I just want you to see what Joe wrote to Jasper Holmes in the immediate aftermath of the battle. It is breathtaking, the duplicity and self-aggrandizement that lurks in this hot-house company town of Washington, D.C. It did in 1942, and it does so now.
On this anniversary of the beginning of it all, here is how Joe described what happened in the aftermath of the victory at Midway, just nine months after the devastating sneak attack at Pearl. It is in his own words, and just as the bureaucrats were getting him out of the way:
Remember Pearl Harbor.
Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com