A Little Bit of History Author unknown

A Little Bit of History

Tour boats ferry people out to the USS Arizona
Memorial in Hawaii every thirty minutes. We just
missed a ferry and had to wait thirty minutes. I went
into a small gift shop to kill time. In the gift shop,
I purchased a small book entitled, Reflections on Pearl
Harbor by Admiral Chester Nimitz.

Sunday, December 7th, 1941: Admiral Chester Nimitz was
attending a concert in Washington D.C. He was paged and
told there was a phone call for him. When he answered
the phone, it was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
on the phone. He told Admiral Nimitz that he (Nimitz)
would now be the Commander of the Pacific Fleet.

Admiral Nimitz flew to Hawaii to assume command of the
Pacific Fleet. He landed at Pearl Harbor on Christmas
Eve, 1941. There was such a spirit of despair,
dejection and defeat, you would have thought the
Japanese had already won the war. On Christmas Day,
1941, Adm. Nimitz was given a boat tour of the
destruction wrought on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese.
Big sunken battleships and navy vessels cluttered the
waters everywhere you looked.

As the tour boat returned to dock, the young helmsman
of the boat asked, "Well Admiral, what do you think
after seeing all this destruction?" Admiral Nimitz's
reply shocked everyone within the sound of his voice.
Admiral Nimitz said, "The Japanese made three of the
biggest mistakes an attack force could ever make, or
God was taking care of America. Which do you think it
was?"

Shocked and surprised, the young helmsman asked, "What
do mean by saying the Japanese made the three biggest
mistakes an attack force ever made?" Nimitz explained:

Mistake number one: the Japanese attacked on Sunday
morning. Nine out of every ten crewmen of those ships
were ashore on leave. If those same ships had been
lured to sea and been sunk, the U.S. would have lost
38,000 men instead of 3,800.

Mistake number two: when the Japanese saw all those
battleships lined in a row, they got so carried away
sinking those battleships, they never once bombed our
dry docks opposite those ships. If they had destroyed
our dry docks, we would have had to tow every one of
those ships to America to be repaired. As it is now,
the ships are in shallow water and can be raised. One
tug can pull them over to the dry docks, and we can
have them repaired and at sea by the time we could
have towed them to America. And I already have crews
ashore anxious to man those ships.

Mistake number three: every drop of fuel in the
Pacific theater of war is in top of the ground storage
tanks five miles away over that hill. One attack plane
could have strafed those tanks and destroyed our fuel
supply. That's why I say the Japanese made three of
the biggest mistakes an attack force could make, or
God was taking care of America.

I've never forgotten what I read in that little book.
It is still an inspiration as I reflect upon it.
Anyway you look at it--Admiral Nimitz was able to see
a silver lining in a situation and circumstance where
everyone else saw only despair and defeatism.

President Roosevelt had chosen the right man for the
right job. We desperately needed a leader [at this
time of our U.S. history] that could see silver
linings in the midst of the clouds of dejection,
despair and defeat.

There is a reason that our national motto is, IN GOD
WE TRUST.

-- Author Unknown