Video: 'Shooting Has Started, Says Roosevelt! Aka Roosevelt "Speech" The Shooting Has Started (1941)'

(Monday, October 27, 1941, 10;00 p.m. EST; during World War II, 41 days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor)— Ten days after a German U-boat torpedoed an American destroyer, the USS Kearney, while on patrol in the North Atlantic near U.S.-occupied Iceland, killing 11 American sailors, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told the nation and the world tonight “the shooting has started.”

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“We have wished to avoid shooting. But the shooting has started,” the President said in delivering his “Navy and Total Defense Address” at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. “And history has recorded who fired the first shot. In the long run, however, all that will matter is who fired the last shot.”

“America has been attacked. The USS Kearny is not just a Navy ship. She belongs to every man, woman, and child in this nation,” the President continued. “All of us Americans, of all opinions, are faced with the choice between the kind of world we want to live in and the kind of world which [German fascist dictator Adolf] Hitler and his hordes would impose upon us.”