Our task force put to sea in early January 1942, to attack the Japanese in the Marshall and Gilbert islands, but the mission was called off on the eve of the attack.
Never tell anyone outside my staff that the Submarine Force and the First Air Fleet were responsible for the failure at Midway. The failure at Midway was mine.
I was 20 years old at Pearl Harbor. I was in the Navy about a year and four months before the war.
My father pulled into Pearl Harbor four days after the bombing, and he said, everything was still burning. He said they never told the public how bad it was. It was really bad.
On December 5, 1941, Chicago led a task force built around the carrier Lexington to Midway Island, at the western end of the Hawaiian Islands, about 1,000 miles from Pearl Harbor.
Japanese naval officers in dress whites are frequent guests at Pearl Harbor's officers' mess and are very polite. They always were. Except, of course, for that little interval there between 1941 and 1945.
Everybody knows about Pearl Harbor. The thing that really fascinated me is that through this tragedy there was this amazing American heroism.
The attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 completely crippled our Pacific Fleet.
I was in the Pacific. The Pacific Theater, as they say.
