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FFM hosts WWII lecture
Kim Johnson - Thu, Jan, 8, 2009
Several Farragut residents were given a lesson on the events leading up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor Monday, Dec. 1, at Town Hall.
Retired Farragut Middle School history teacher Frank Galbraith presented “Dec. 7, 1941, A Day of Infamy” to a packed house that included at least five World War II veterans.
“We must not forget what happened at Pearl Harbor. We must not forget the lessons we learned in World War II,” Galbraith said.
He cited World War I as a precursor to World War II.
“World War I was a terrible, terrible war. New things had been introduced — things to kill people — like poison gas, guns bigger than this room. They had tanks and airplanes dropping bombs on people. They called this war the ‘Great War’ and it was, they called it the ‘War to End All Wars,’ and it wasn’t. It set the stage for World War II,” he said.
With the signing if the Versailles Treaty, Germany was officially named the culprit of World War I and was forced to pay tremendous amounts of money in restitution.
This left most of Germany destitute.
“Some of these German soldiers had been heroes,” Galbraith said.
“Adolf Hitler joined the German army during World War I. For four years he performed feats of bravery and was wounded a couple of times. When the war was over, he was in the hospital, and when he woke up he found out that Germany had surrendered.”
Following the war, Hitler became acquainted with the National Socialist Party.
“They said the reason Germany really lost the war was because of communists and Jewish people and he liked to hear that. So he joined them, and all of a sudden he found something that he had that he had never known before. He had a gift for speaking,” Galbraith said.
“He was a very evil man, but he was no dummy and the next thing you know, people were listening to him and they decided to overthrow the country,” he added.
In the meantime, Benito Mussolini already had come to power in Italy and was pushing his country toward war.
After the failed Munich Putsch, Hitler decided if he could not overthrow the country through force, he would do it through politics.
“[The National Socialist Party] started saying they would put people back to work — Germany was in a terrible depression — and by 1933 Hitler was elected to be the Chancellor, or vice president,” Galbraith said.
“When the president died, Hitler became the leader of Germany. Germany was being led by a man who was very evil, but no dummy. He had designs for other things that people didn’t realize,” he added.
Meanwhile, in the Far East, the Japanese were watching Mussolini as well.
“The Japanese military saw what Mussolini had done and they said in the Far East, all the seven corners of the world should be under one roof, and that one roof should be Japanese. So the military started taking control. And they took control not only of every branch of the military, but in politics as well. If a politician disagreed with them, they would simply kill him. They murdered their way into power,” Galbraith said.
The Japanese began systematically attacking China, and they were using scrap metal bought from the United States to make their weapons.
The United States, also Japan’s largest supplier of oil, placed an embargo on trade with Japan until they agreed to stop slaughtering the Chinese.
By 1931 after having taken the Rhineland, Austria and the Sudetenland with no interference by European allies, Hitler took Poland.
“Historians say World War II began Sept. 1, 1939, when Hitler took Poland,” Galbraith said.
Japan was watching and decided it needed to be as successful as Hitler, and in order to do that it needed to attack the United States.
“Hideki Tojo became war minister of Japan in 1941 and he said the first thing that must happen is a surprise attack,” Galbraith said.
“The U.S. had just moved its pacific fleet from San Diego to the Hawaiian islands, to Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese began preparing for attack by practicing bombing runs of model U.S. ships and adapting torpedoes for the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor.
At 7:30 a.m., Pearl Harbor time, the Japanese attacked and began what president Franklin D. Roosevelt called “a date that will live in infamy,” and pulling the United States into World War II.
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