Sunday, July 06, 2008

This made me smile

In July 1944 President Roosevelt made a trip to Hawaii to discuss Pacific strategy with General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz.

As historian William Manchester tells it in American Caesar, Douglas MacArthur, 1880-1964, after greetings aboard the ship that brought FDR to Hawaii:

...they all went ashore, agreeing to meet the next morning for a six-hour tour of Oahu's defenses. FDR said he wanted a convertible and he wanted it to be bright red.

Nimitz found there were only two such cars on the island, one of them belonging to the fire chief and the other to the madam who owned Honolulu's biggest house of prostitution.

The madam begged the officers to use hers, but it would have been quickly identified by the spectators, so they chose the other.
Manchester doesn't say whether Nimitz told FDR and MacArthur about the other red convertible.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

John, I couldn’t picture the trio of men you wrote about, so I found a picture. It is a good one too.

MacArthur, Roosevelt, and Nimitz aboard USS Baltimore, Pearl Harbor, 26 Jul 1944

http://ww2db.com/image.php?image_id=470