In Rememberance of December 7, 1941 ...

[marble falls]

[LetMyPeopleVote]

1. On National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, we honor those whose lives were cut short

Link to tweet

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2. My father left a chunk

of his soul and sanity for the greater good.

Bless you Dad.

[marble falls]

3. WWII had to be so hard on everybody, there was no clear sense that we had a chance to win ...

... especially in the beginning, when huge sacrifices were made just to stop the advance of the Axis.

G*D bless your dad for stepping up when there was no clear sense of how, or even that we could prevail. The world was burning down all around us.

I'm ex-Navy and this day has a powerful influence on its strategies even now.

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7. Dad was an Ensign later Lt.(jg)

served at the end of the Leyte landings, Mindanao and the pitched Battle of Balikpapan, where he saw the true terror of total war.

Iron men in tin ships.

[wnylib]

4. My parents told me how they got the news.

They were dating at the time and my mother had gone with my father to his parents' farm for dinner. There was no TV then, of course, and they did not have the radio on during the visit.

On the way back to the city to take my mother home, there was no radio in the car. Radios were an extra item in cars back then.

When they reached the city, they saw newsboys on the street corners selling extra editions of the local paper and people crowding around them. My father squeezed through the crowd to get a copy with screaming headlines: JAPAN ATTACKS PEARL HARBOR.

They got married before he shipped out with the Navy to the Pacific.

[marble falls]

5. I think this is the difference between then and now. They had a sense of a nation as a physical ...

... entity they were part of. They felt they as individuals could make a meaningful contribution. I get no sense of that now.

[Leith]

8. That was beautiful

I grew up listening to my mom's 78s. Here are what people sang and felt at the time:

And this one:

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9. Approximately 167,000 WWII veterans

of the about 16 million that served, are still living. 180 die every day.