Professor Greg Jackson

These include landing on a Germany-first approach that will prioritize defeating the Nazi threat, and the establishment of the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff, which will become the Supreme Allied Command early next year.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Much more is still happening in December 1941.

For one thing, Admiral Husband Kimmel is taking the brunt of the blame for Pearl Harbor.

Hardly surprising.

The national wound remains very much an open wound.

More than a week after the attack, military families are still freshly processing their grief and loss.

Like Army Air Serviceman Dave King, who writes to his mother in Hunter, Kansas about his brother.

I will tell you that Elmer is dead.

He was about the first to go.

Now, it might not be fair or right.

Historians will eternally debate that.

But as commander-in-chief of both the Pacific Fleet and the entire U.S.

Fleet, husband Kimmel's taking the fall and losing both commands.

Amid other shifts and consolidations, command of the U.S.

Fleet will pass to Admiral Ernest J. King early next year.

No relation to the young soldier just mentioned, by the way.

Command of the Pacific Fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor goes to Admiral Chester Nimitz that same December.

Meanwhile, the Japanese offensive in the Pacific is hardly finished.

As we learned in episode 194, the Empire of the Rising Sun launches several concurrent attacks.