Talk:SS President Hoover

Robert McNamara was on deck in 1937 when ship was bombed edit

From Fog of War, Errol Morris's documentary on Robert McNamara, in the additional features, Robert McNamara talking:

Shanghai

1937

It was hard as hell for a student to get a summer job. So my father, through some contacts he had, got me a job as a sailor on the Dollar Line ship The President Hoover. And I was in Shanghai at the time the Japanese bombed it. As a matter of fact our ship was bombed. Obviously we thought it was bombed by the Japanese. It turned out later we'd been mistaken by the Chinese for a Japanese ship. Stupidly I was on deck watching the planes bomb us! Totally unprotected! It was absurd judgment. That was toward the beginning of the Chinese-Japanese war. And I didn't know what had gone before that brought the Japanese to that point, and I didn't realize the degree to which that was a step toward Pearl Harbor. I had no understanding of the geopolitics of that area. These events were all a part of a sequence of actions. It's a sequence! And I didn't understand it.

108.193.226.67 (talk) 21:57, 6 March 2014 (UTC)Reply