Third and fourth terms of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt
On the morning of December 7, 1941, the Japanese struck the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor with a surprise attack, knocking out the main American battleship fleet and killing 2,403 American servicemen and civilians. The great majority of scholars have rejected the conspiracy thesis that Roosevelt, or any other high government officials, knew in advance about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese had kept their secrets closely guarded, and while senior American officials were aware that war was imminent, they did not expect an attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt had anticipated that the first attack would take place in the Dutch East Indies, Thailand, or the Philippines.
Cornelius Cole Smith Jr.
During the attack, he led a four-man rescue party which pulled between fifteen and twenty sailors from oil-soaked and burning water; he modestly recounted his actions in later years saying only that his rescue party did "pretty good". He searched in vain among the wounded and dying at the Naval Hospital for his friend Harry Gaver Jr., son of Black-Foxe Military Institute commandant Major Harry Gaver, who had been killed on the USS Oklahoma earlier that morning. He later said, while standing among Marines firing at enemy planes flying over the Navy Yard, that "every Leatherneck's face wore a look of shame"; "Here we are with our pants down and the striking force of our Pacific Fleet is settling on the bottom of East Loch, Pearl Harbor. Who wouldn't be ashamed?" He wrote a personal account of the battle, based on his own wartime diary, for the Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute, "...A Hell of a Christmas," (December 1968) years later.