“Remember Pearl Harbor!” was the great World War II rallying cry. The sneak Japanese attack, designed to cripple the U.S. Navy’s Pacific fleet, would be labelled by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a “date which will live in infamy.” And…
October has arrived, and with it the final month of what has seemed like an interminable election season. As a sometime political commentator, I should be filled with excitement, eager to follow the twists and turns of the days to…
News that Lou Conter, the last survivor of Japan’s attack on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, died at age 102 reminds us that the generation that fought in the most destructive war in history is fading away. Conter was…
On this date, at 7:55 a.m., Dec. 7, 1941, Imperial Japan launched its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Their goal was to keep the U.S. military from supporting American possessions like the Philippines and Guam or British outposts like…
Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay By Craig L. Symonds (Oxford University Press, 496 pages, $29.95) We have no dearth of Political Generals, that is, with a capital “P.” Gen. Mark Milley, for example, claimed…
While most Americans commemorate the anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 — what President Franklin Roosevelt called “a date which will live in infamy” — most Americans are probably not aware that the infamy of…
The Naval Institute Press has just published a small book titled The Road to Pearl Harbor: Great Power War in Asia and the Pacific, which is part history and part a warning that history may be about to repeat itself…
Eighty years ago, on Aug. 7, 1942, American Marines went ashore on the tropical islands of Guadalcanal and its tiny neighbors Tulagi, Gavutu, and Tanambogo. This marked the first sustained offensive action by American land forces in the Pacific. After…
Midway Airport. Some think its name comes from being “midway” between New York and the West Coast. Others mistakenly think it is named for the “Monsters of the Midway,” Alonzo Stagg’s legendary University of Chicago Maroon football teams, the name…
