How much do you know about the raid on Pearl Harbor?

[Brian37]

Um this is weird, I have had problems posting images too. 

But as far as WW2 History, you are talking about thousands of historical events, multiple world leaders, military leaders and countless key battles. I for example didn't really know that Pearl Harbor only got us involved in the Pacific, and we didn't really get involved in Europe until D-Day in 44. It is a boatload of details over basically a 12 year period from the time Hitler took power to the fall of Berlin in 45. 

You're fast, but I fixed the link.  

But the one detail that shocked me is that the guys monitoring the radar that day mistook the zeros for allied bombers.

Why is that shocking? Two privates training on the SCR-270B set spot a "huge" blip. Biggest they'd ever seen. They report it to Air Information Center, which is closed. The only officer there is a 2nd Lt. fighter pilot doing a "familiarization" visit, not in the chain of command. The AIC closed at 7 AM, but he had been told to be there from 4 am to 8 am, and he was a good boy. The telephone operator passed the buck to Kermit Tyler when Lockard called from the Point. Tyler knew a flight of B-17s was coming in from the US and assumed that's what the men on Opana Point were seeing. This was trivial enough that the Congressional Hearings didn't subpoena him. He ended the war as a major.

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If the first question had listed one answer as Hawaii, and the others as different places, I would have gotten it right. It assumes everyone knows it's in Hawaii.

I don't know the date or anything. I know it's kind of weird we got involved in WW2 because Japan attacked us, but almost everything else they teach in history class involved us going to Europe. Aside from dropping two nukes, and the debate over whether or not that was the right thing to do instead of putting boots on the ground.

Most of the USN and almost all of the Marines fought in the Pacific. But the American-British Conversations earlier in 1941 had established the principle of "Germany First". FDR and Churchill confirmed this at the Atlantic Conference later that year and it was made public at the Casablanca Conference.

As for the nukes, the most humane thing we could have done was to end the war quickly. It worked. (Vastly more complicated than this but boring to most people.)

Not shocking in the context of knowing the details now as you put them here. But just shocking in that I didn't know until recently. It makes sense now. Kinda like when scientists set out to figure something out, but their findings aren't always what they expected. 

I am not going to argue the use of the nukes. It was still horrifying for the civilians whom survived even if it did shorten the war. I will say this, the scientists who made them, many were horrified at their invention and understood the global implications which humanity is still having to deal with today.

I see the nukes much like that thought experiment with the fat guy on a bridge over a runaway railway car. You can save everyone on the car by shoving him off the bridge, but you are still committing murder to save lives.  I take the position that War is hell and any entry into such should not be treated as a Rambo movie. It is an unfortunate part of human reality that we evolved to be tribal, and while a military is a necessity, I take Ike's speech about being careful with the responsibility of use of the military.