It has been said that Japanese gains in the Philippines were made
possible only by the success of their surprise attack on Pearl
Harbor. I tell you that this is not so.
Even if the attack had not been made your map will show that it
would have been a hopeless operation for us to send the Fleet to
the Philippines through thousands of miles of ocean, while all
those island bases were under the sole control of the Japanese.
The consequences of the attack on Pearl Harbor--serious as they
were--have been wildly exaggerated in other ways. And these
exaggerations come originally from Axis propagandists; but they
have been repeated, I regret to say, by Americans in and out of
public life.
You and I have the utmost contempt for Americans who, since Pearl
Harbor, have whispered or announced "off the record" that there was
no longer any Pacific Fleet--that the Fleet was all sunk or
destroyed on December 7th--that more than a thousand of our planes
were destroyed on the ground. They have suggested slyly that the
government has withheld the truth about casualties--that eleven or
twelve thousand men were killed at Pearl Harbor instead of the
figures as officially announced. They have even served the enemy
propagandists by spreading the incredible story that ship-loads of
bodies of our honored American dead were about to arrive in New
York harbor to be put into a common grave.
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