Remembering Pearl Harbor
Tomorrow in the US is the 75th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor bombing when the Japanese Imperial Navy did their most successful sneak attack of the US naval facility in Oahu, Hawaii. (It was December 8 in the Philippines when it happened.) Japanese Admiral Isoruko Yamamoto, who studied in a US Naval Academy, planned this attack. Using hundreds of carrier based Japanese planes like the Nakajima Kate, Val Aichi, and the Mitsubishi Zero, they swooped down on the US Navy which was tied up around Ford Island, including eight mighty US battleships, 20 of which the Jap airplanes sank.
The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was done in two waves within in just two hours, killing 2,000 American sailors and wounding another 1,000. The air attack was led by Mitsuo Fuchida and Minuro Genda. Both survived Word War II. I read the book written by Gordon Prange on the story of Mitsuo Fuchida during his retirement years in San Francisco, USA.
It turned out that he was even assigned at the Lahug Airfield in Cebu City and in Davao. Later, he was assigned in Hiroshima, but one day before the bombing of Hiroshima, he was called to Tokyo. Upon the arrival of his train in Tokyo on August 8, his officers who met him at the Tokyo Station, told me that Hiroshima was gone. He only asked one question: "How many planes were used in that bombing?" And the answer was, of course as we know it, is only one plane.
When the US Military learned that Mitsuo Fuchida was still alive and in Tokyo, the war had already ended. On September 2, 1945, Mitsuo Fuchida was one among the delegation of Japanese officers brought onboard the battlewagon USS Missouri to sign the surrender documents in Tokyo Bay. The Americans wanted to make sure that the Japanese officers who bombed Pearl Harbor would be present at the surrender ceremonies at the end of World War II.
Incidentally, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said he would visit Pearl Harbor this coming December 26-27. He will be the first Japanese prime minister to ever visit Pearl Harbor since World War II. This is to reciprocate the history visit by President Barrack Obama during the commemoration of the bombing of Hiroshima last August 8. He was the first American president to visit Hiroshima.
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I was watching the Senate investigation on the killing of Mayor Rolando Espinosa Sr. and for the first time, Senator Leila De Lima faced her former lover/driver/bodyguard Ronnie Dayan and added to the drama. What we could clearly decipher in Ronnie Dayan is he seems to have his dates wrong. He said he drove then secretary De Lima to Baguio in 2014 when Kerwin said the year was 2015. Who was lying and who was telling the truth? Of course, Kerwin was telling the truth as they had a selfie with her and that photo had a date imprinted on it.
My take on Ronnie Dayan is simple. He has told the truth as far as these things will pin down De Lima. But when he was asked whether De Lima gave him some monetary assistance, he replied that she did not give him any money. How then could he have constructed his huge house if his paramour wasn't giving him any monetary assistance? If he used his "influence" to put a friend to be on top of one agency under the DoJ, then he must have gotten more than just money from De Lima. I can sense that he did not want to name any friends as that opens a can of worms and sends him to jail.
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I fully concur with yesterday's editorial of The Freeman entitled "Where is government when it is needed?" Whenever there is a fire, the usual practice of housing the fire victims in school classrooms means that the students would also be at the losing end. Allow me to quote part of the article:
And now reality bites even more ironically harder, as the few classrooms that students use in what their government says are for their world-class education will now have to be given up for fire victims. It is plain incredible how easily the unrelenting logic for K to 12 can be swept aside for no other reason than that the government is simply unprepared for anything as common as fire.
Time and again, in more ways than anyone can imagine, the Philippines has shown itself to be hopelessly unprepared for anything, either in the unexpected fates that occasionally befall it, or in the half-baked policies that it frequently embarks on knowingly and willfully. From typhoons weak to catastrophic, to small fires and raging infernos, to policies grand or benign, the country just cannot climb over the hump called unpreparedness." At this point we exhort our politicians to come up with an evacuation center for the sole purpose of housing fire or typhoon victims. If we can build a container van for Sinulog visitors, why not container vans for fire victims?
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