On the recordDecember 7, 2011
70 years ago today at 0745 in the morning in Hawaii--where it is now about 0840 in the morning--our country was attacked at Pearl Harbor bringing us into World War II. It was a war that had been ongoing in Europe for more than 3 years, and in Asia, in different forms, for a much longer period, probably 7 to 8 years. This began a national effort that was historically unprecedented in its unity and in its vigor in which the United States astounded the world in terms of its capacity to respond to this attack on many different fronts. Our economic production was staggering by 1943. Our production schedule included 125,000 aircraft, 75,000 tanks, 35,000 antiaircraft guns, and 10 million tons of merchant shipping. During the course of that war, the productive capacity of this country gave our allied forces more than half of all of its armaments, including 86 percent of the armaments that were used in response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. I rise today to express my thanks and my appreciation to the men and women of that generation who stepped forward and responded to the call of service in this period. During World War II more than 16 million Americans stepped forward to serve our country. In that period more than 400,000 of them died, including 291,557 who were killed in action. Another 670,846 were wounded in action. Out of those 16.1 million, today about 1.7 million World War II veterans remain alive.…
