Quote:
Originally Posted by Rain Man
Interesting. I guess the talent pool of destroyer captains isn't that large.
I was thinking about these guys firing at the submarine, and that really takes a lot of guts. I'm imagining the scenario. You're not at war, you're in a very friendly refuge, and there's nothing to warrant suspicion until you see this conning tower.
The odds would seem to be overwhelmingly high that it's an American ship that just fell out of contact for some reason, or is on a training run. it's at the mouth of an enormous naval base. You fire on this thing and kill a bunch of American soldiers, and your life is pretty much ruined. It seems like it would have been a prudent decision to radio around and say, "Who the heck is that conning tower? Someone try to reach them and tell them to identify themselves." And then your life would be ruined if it ended up sinking a battleship.
Unless we're missing part of the story about identification of that sub, those guys firing the first shots really had some guts.
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Well, kind of. Our forces at Pearl (and the Pacific in general) were under a war warning going back to late November, if memory serves. We knew, or at least strongly suspected, that the Japanese were going to attack us. We just didn't know where.