Japanese Attack

WASHINGTON -- Nearly 58 years after Japanese raiders caught U.S. forces by surprise at Pearl Harbor, a dispute over blame for the disaster is still raging.Now, President Clinton is being asked to intervene.Seven retired senior officers, backed by a majority of the Senate, want Clinton to excuse Pearl Harbor's top commanders for the base's unpreparedness and posthumously promote them."The time is long overdue to correct this gross injustice," the retired officers, including four past chiefs of naval operations and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote Clinton last month.

Cannons were fired from one well-known ship and a wreath was dropped from another yesterday in an afternoon of homecoming and remembrance at Baltimore's Inner Harbor.Returning from a nine-month tour of Europe and the Caribbean in full, regal sail, the Pride of Baltimore II fired a fusillade of shots from the 4-pound cannons mounted on its sides.The shots, which echoed across the harbor, coincided with the dropping of a red, white and blue wreath by three survivors of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor from the stern of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Taney.

John W. Lynch, a retired naval officer whose career spanned more than four decades, died Monday of complications of a stroke at the Lorien Nursing Home in Columbia. He was 82.The Columbia resident was born and raised in Pikesville and graduated from Calvert Hall College. He enlisted in the Navy in 1932.During his naval service, he witnessed some of the major events and personalities of the era.He recounted his life in an 800-page memoir, "Around the World in 80 Years," which was privately printed several years ago and took nine years to complete.

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration's unprecedented declassification and release of material from the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing, or PDB, has rekindled interest in what the president knew about the al-Qaida threat and when he knew it. To some, such as Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic member of the 9/11 commission, the item, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the United States," should have provided "warning" of the attacks on...

Pearl Harbor Betrayed: The True Story of a Man and a Nation Under Attack, by Michael V. Gannon. Henry Holt and Co. 339 pages. $27.50. One of the lingering debates about the Second World War centers on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Were the two U.S. commanders derelict in their duty or were they scapegoats for a pattern of ineptitude in Washington? Michael Gannon, a naval historian, places the blame on Washington in the title of his new book, and he offers solid proof that the commanders, Adm. Husband E. Kimmel and Army Lt. Gen. Walter C. Short, were treated shabbily.

Total victory for the Japanese at Pearl Harbor slips away at 8:10 a.m. The aircraft carrier Lexington eases out of Hawaii at that hour, the last of the three aircraft carriers based there to leave port.For all the carnage and destruction the Japanese would wreak on Pearl Harbor in two more days, it is the aircraft carriers they are after. The attack on Pearl Harbor is not so much an attempt to defeat the United States as to cripple the Americans long enough for Japan to seize and hold the Western Pacific and Indochina.

J oseph Lloyd Alsop, who was stationed aboard a Navy minesweeper during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and later participated in the D-Day landing in Normandy, died Nov. 23 of respiratory failure at St. Joseph Medical Center. The longtime Towson resident was 88. Mr. Alsop was born and raised in Fredericksburg, Va., and after high school enlisted in the Navy in 1939. On Dec. 6, 1941, Mr. Alsop's ship, the USS Boggs, an old three-stack World War I-era destroyer that had been converted to a high-speed minesweeper, was steaming into Pearl Harbor after a week at sea towing targets for gunnery practice.

WILMINGTON, Del. -- Edward Kimmel sits in his den -- he calls it his "war room" -- surrounded by paintings of battleships, World War II posters, oceanographic charts and volume after volume on Pearl Harbor. Here, he wages the skirmishes of his decade-old war with history.Fifty-six years ago today, Kimmel's father was commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet when Japanese bombs rained on Pearl Harbor. He later was accused of being ill-prepared for the attack, which killed more than 2,400 people.

Good morning it's December 7th and, yes, it's still a day that will live in infamy. Seventy-one years later, Pearl Harbor is attracting a fair amount of search traffic on the Internet. Things should pick up photo wise as remembrances get under way in Hawaii later this morning.  We're mostly relying on Twitter today because Google is being a bit stingy this week with the trends. The search giant hasn't updated its hot trends data since Tuesday. I know we all love the Victoria Secret Fashion Show , but I'm thinking America has finally moved on to something else.

In a recent letter to The Sun, Marge Griffith of Pasadena recalled the fear and anxiety she felt as a 7-year-old following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. She wrote: "The weeks that followed were traumatic and filled with insecurities. At that time, the first lady did not make an appearance or use the media to tell people to talk to their children and reassure them that everything would be all right." This isn't entirely true. For years, Eleanor Roosevelt had written My Day, a daily newspaper column that was published in many of the nation's papers, including The Evening Sun. A woman of indefatigable energy, Roosevelt also turned out a monthly magazine feature, wrote books in addition to lecturing widely and was probably the first first lady to maintain such a vigorous globe-trotting schedule.