"Reflections on Pearl Harbor"

John Guy writes: "What God did at Pearl Harbor that day is 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 Chester Nimitz was attending a concert in Washington, DC. He was paged and told there was a phone call for him. When he answered the phone, it was President Franklin Delano 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 everywhere 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 make or, 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 Fredericksburg, Texas -- he was a born optimist.

But any way 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 lining 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! IN GOD WE TRUST."

Town Has Fun With Sign War

May 2021 

The Canadian town of Listowel (Ontario) has been embroiled in a war of words via business signs that has captivated local residents and people around the world. Not all signs are listed below, but a lot of them are!
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56972907

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/sign-war-listowel-1.6005718

https://www.escape.com.au/destinations/north-america/canada/hilarious-sign-war-kicks-off-in-canada/news-story/e4ec6782ac16fec3901df0d89ccd4173

 

Mary Ball Washington - Our First President's Mom!

Original Article HERE

Mary Ball Washington, George’s single mother, 

often gets overlooked – but she’s well worth saluting

May 7, 2021 12.33pm EDT

By Martha Saxton
Mary Washington helped her son develop into the leader he became. While her son was the subject of several portrait artists, there is no record that Mary ever was. Stock Montage/Getty Images


On Mother’s Day, it is important and poignant to recall the hard life of Mary Ball Washington, who struggled – mostly alone – to raise our Founding Father. Historians have left us with inaccurate and mostly unpleasant accounts of her long and laborious years.

After George Washington’s death, historians canonized him and his mother, too.

But unlike George’s enduring sainthood, praise for Mary was short-lived. In the late 19th century, George’s biographers began interpreting the few shreds of evidence about Mary – almost all of it from George – to mean that she was overprotective, possessive and greedy.

By the 1950s she had become, in the word of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, a termagant, an ill-tempered shrew. The author, James Flexner, created a portrait of Mary as a woman insatiably hungry for money that she didn’t need, and intent on keeping George by her side. Other nasty myths still circulate alongside these: that she was illiterate, pipe-smoking, uncouth and slovenly.

We believe good journalism is good for democracy and necessary for it.Learn more

These poisonous portraits bear little resemblance to the industrious, worried, frugal, devoted and self-reliant woman who emerges from my research as a professor of history and women’s studies. I recently wrote a book about Mary Washington. In my research, I found that Mary’s challenging life was very different from the myths that grew up around her.

A view of the Rappahannock River as Mary Washington would have seen it from her front windows. Enrico Ferorelli, CC BY-SA

Daughter of a servant, mother of a hero

Mary was born in either 1708 or 1709; there are no records. Her father was an elderly, slave-owning planter and her mother was probably an indentured servant. By 12, she had lost her father, stepfather, mother and half-brother to death in the disease-ridden Chesapeake region.

From these terrible losses Mary acquired two parcels of land, a good horse and saddle, and three enslaved boys. She stayed in what had been her mother’s house, living with her older half-sister. There the shocked girl worked diligently to help manage the household and make herself indispensable.

She also grew into her role of slave-owner, and learned to extort work out of people who were enslaved. She began assuming the habits of Anglican piety in this mournful time, trying to subdue her feelings and resign herself to God’s mysterious will.

When she was about 22, she married Augustine Washington, a wealthy widower with two sons in Great Britain and a daughter in Virginia. Mary traded her duties on a small farm and the companionship of her affectionate half-sister for more expansive tasks as the mistress of a large plantation and marital obligations to an acquisitive, restless planter.

The couple had five surviving children: George, born in 1732; Elizabeth, Samuel, John Augustine, and Charles. The growing family and many of their enslaved people moved three times, eventually settling across the Rappahannock River from the growing town of Fredericksburg.

Augustine died suddenly in 1743 when he was about 49 years old. George, the eldest, was 11, and the youngest was 4. Augustine left his best properties to his eldest sons by his first marriage, Lawrence and Augustine. Mary was allowed to stay in the Fredericksburg house but was to turn it over to George when he came of age at 21.

She received the same number of enslaved people she had brought to the marriage. If she wanted more, they were to come from those allotted to her other children – setting their desires at odds with hers. If she remarried, the executors could demand security to be sure her children would receive their full inheritances at 21. Failing that she would lose custody of them. She remained a widow all her years.

Single motherhood in the 1700s

With her income and resources seriously diminished because of the dispersal of Augustine’s properties, Mary set about making sure that her daughter and four sons had such education and polish as she could provide. Elizabeth learned the arts of serving tea, managing a household and decorative handwork.

Mary kept the young men in proper clothes and wigs. These could be expensive, costing as much as 3 pounds. That could have been about US$2,400 in today’s dollars, assuming the American pound was valued the same as the British pound at the time. The wigs had to be de-liced by enslaved people who would otherwise be doing field work.

Mary dissuaded George from going into the British Navy at 14 but failed to convince him not to join General Edward Braddock’s disastrous 1755 campaign. She nursed George back to health after the illness he suffered succeeding this battle and several other serious sicknesses, including smallpox.

She tried to imbue in her children her extensive practical and religious wisdom. She had some success, especially with George and Elizabeth, but none of her children became frugal. Despite the family’s straitened circumstances, Mary saw all of her offspring marry up. George married Martha Dandridge Custis, the richest woman in Virginia.

Surviving the Revolution

In the years before the Revolution, Mary, like almost all small farmers at the time, was poorer than ever and sometimes asked her extremely wealthy eldest son for small amounts of money. As he slid deeply into debt himself from his extravagances and expanding ambitions, he begrudged her the insignificant bits of cash she needed and insisted she could not be in want – a claim he repeated throughout her life.

George wrote in 1782, having not seen or been in touch with his mother for seven years, “confident I am that she has not a child that would not divide the last sixpence to relieve her from real [emphasis in the original] distress. This she has been repeatedly assured of by me … in fact she has ample income of her own.”

Mary lived through the long years of the revolution alone. In her last years, she struggled like all small farmers against debt and bad harvests. She, too, suffered from high taxes, severe shortages of corn and salt and the threat of smallpox. Her overseer, exploiting the vulnerability of an elderly woman, cheated Mary throughout the war.

George Washington bought his mother her final house in Fredericksburg when he took over the Ferry Farm. Enrico Ferorelli, CC BY-SA

Mary lived to see the revolution won and her son elected the nation’s first president. As George said, praising her in Fredericksburg at the end of the revolution, she led him to manhood in the absence of a father. Always sparing in her praise of worldly achievements, she gave him the compliment he probably most valued: that he had always been a good son. She died of breast cancer in August 1789 months after George became the nations’ first president.

Mother and son shared many traits

After some years of reflected hagiography, Mary‘s reputation began a precipitous decline in the late 19th century. Ideas about biography and psychology began changing. Nurture began competing with an earlier idea of people being born with an essential character that needed to unfold. Mothers, who in the antebellum period were described as self-sacrificing vessels of virtue holding the new nation together, began to be held responsible for facilitating – or not – their sons’ ambitions.

Male writers then saw evidence of Mary’s love for George – such as keeping him out of the British Navy – as possessiveness and interference with his glorious military destiny. They saw her requests for money as her irrational greediness, not his stinginess.

Male historians, even now, have never doubted that his exasperation with his mother was justified, nor have they tried to find out more about her circumstances. Instead, they agree that he desperately needed to free himself from her efforts to limit him before he could father our nation.

But mother and son were much alike in physical strength, in superb horsemanship, in irascibility, in penny-pinching, in the capacity for extraordinary persistence and in their strenuous, lifelong efforts to maintain a measure of equilibrium. I believe that without Mary’s brave, enduring and self-denying mothering, we would not have had the brave, enduring and self-denying man who led both the revolution and the optimistic experiment in governing that resulted.

How The Conversation is different
Every article you read here is written by university scholars and researchers with deep expertise in their subjects, sharing their knowledge in their own words. We don’t oversimplify complicated issues, but we do explain and clarify. We believe bringing the voices of experts into the public discourse is good for democracy.

Beth Daley
Editor and General Manager