Little Bit of History

...sent to me by email. Original source not known as yet.

This Little Bit Of History

Really interesting, and I never knew this
little bit of history:

Tour boats ferry people out to the USS
Arizona Memorial in Hawaii every thirty minutes. We just missed a ferry and had
to wait thirty minutes.. I went into a small gift shop to kill time. In the gift
shop, I purchased a small book entitled, "Reflections on Pearl Harbor " by
Admiral Chester Nimitz.

Sunday, December 7th, 1941--Admiral
ChesterNimitz was attending a concert in Washington D.C. He was paged and told
there was a phone call for him. When he answered the phone, it was President
FranklinDelano Roosevelt on the phone. He told Admiral Nimitz that he (Nimitz)
would now be the Commander of the Pacific Fleet.

Admiral Nimitz flew to Hawaii to assume
command of the Pacific Fleet. He landed at Pearl Harbor on Christmas Eve, 1941.
There was such a spirit of despair, dejection and defeat--you would have thought
the Japanese had already won the war. On Christmas Day, 1941, Adm. Nimitz was
given a boat tour of the destruction wrought on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese..
Big sunken battleships and navy vessels cluttered the waters every where you
looked.

As the tour boat returned to dock, the
young helmsman of the boat asked, "Well Admiral, what do you think after seeing
all this destruction?" Admiral Nimitz's reply shocked everyone within the sound
of his voice.

Admiral Nimitz said, "The Japanese made
three of the biggest mistakes an attack force could ever make, or God was taking
care of America . Which do you think it was?"

Shocked and surprised, the young helmsman
asked, "What do mean by saying the Japanese made the three biggest mistakes an
attack force ever made?" Nimitz explained:

Mistake number one
: the Japanese attacked on
Sunday morning. Nine out of every
ten crewmen of those ships were ashore on leave. If those same ships had been
lured to sea and been sunk--we would have lost 38,000 men instead of
3,800.

Mistake number two
: when the Japanese saw all
those battleships lined in a row, they got so carried away sinking those
battleships, they never once bombed our dry docks opposite those ships. If they
had destroyed our dry docks, we would have had to tow every one of those ships
to America to be repaired. As it is now, the ships are in shallow water and can
be raised. One tug can pull them over to the dry docks, and we can have them
repaired and at sea by the time we could have towed them to America . And I
already have crews ashore anxious to
man those ships.

Mistake number three: Every drop of
fuel in the Pacific theater of war is in top of the ground storage tanks five
miles away over that hill. One attack plane could have strafed those tanks and
destroyed our fuel supply. That's why I say the Japanese made three of the
biggest mistakes an attack force could makeor God was taking care of America
.

I've never forgotten what I read in that
little book. It is still an inspiration as I reflect upon it. In jest, I might
suggest that because Admiral Nimitz was a Texan, born and raised in
Fredricksburg, Texas--he was a born optimist. But anyway you look at
it--Admiral Nimitz was able to see a silver lining in a situation and
circumstance where everyone else saw only despair and
defeatism.

President Roosevelt had chosen the right
man for the right job. We desperately needed a leader that could see silver
linings in the midst of the clouds of dejection, despair and
defeat.

There is a reason that our national motto
is, IN GOD WE
TRUST

Why have we forgotten? PRAY FOR OUR
COUNTRY!