Three mistakes

Rico says his father forwards this one, from a Texan friend of his, about Pearl Harbor:

Tour boats ferry people out to the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii every thirty minutes. We just missed one, and thus had thirty minutes to wait. I went into a small gift shop to kill time; there I purchased a small book entitled Reflections on Pearl Harbor by Admiral Chester Nimitz.
On Sunday, December 7th, 1941, Admiral Nimitz was attending a concert in Washington, D.C. He was paged and told there was a phone call for him. When he answered, it was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who told the admiral that Nimitz would now be Commander of the Pacific Fleet.
Admiral Nimitz flew to Hawaii to assume command of the Fleet. He landed at Pearl Harbor on Christmas Eve of 1941. There was such a spirit of despair, dejection, and defeat, you would have thought the Japanese had already won the war.
On Christmas Day, Admiral Nimitz was given a boat tour of the destruction wrought at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. Big battleships and navy vessels, all sunk, cluttered the waters every where you looked.
As the tour boat returned to dock, the young helmsman asked: "Well Admiral, what do you think after seeing all this destruction?"
Admiral Nimitz shocked everyone within the sound of his voice by replying: "The Japanese made three of the biggest mistakes an attack force could ever make, or God was taking care of America. Which do you think it was?"
Shocked and surprised, the young helmsman asked: "What do mean, the Japanese made the three biggest mistakes an attack force ever made?"
Nimitz then explained:
"Mistake number one was, the Japanese attacked on Sunday morning. Nine out of every ten crewmen of those ships were ashore on leave. If those same ships had been lured to sea and sunk, we would have lost 38,000 men instead of 3,800.
"Mistake number two was, when the Japanese saw all those battleships lined in a row, they got so carried away sinking them, they never bombed our dry docks opposite those ships. If they had destroyed our dry docks, we would have had to tow everyone of those ships to America to be repaired. As it is now, the ships are in shallow water and can be raised. One tug can pull them over to the dry docks, and we can have them repaired and at sea by the time we could have towed them to America. And I already have crews ashore anxious to man those ships.
"Mistake number three was, every drop of fuel in the Pacific theater of war is on top of the ground in storage tanks five miles away over that hill. One attack plane could have strafed those tanks and destroyed our fuel supply.
"That's why I say the Japanese made three of the biggest mistakes an attack force could make. Either that, or God was taking care of America."

I've never forgotten what I read in that little book. It is still an inspiration as I reflect upon it.
In jest, I might suggest that, because Admiral Nimitz was a Texan, born and raised in Fredricksburg, Texas, he was a born optimist.
But, any way you look at it, Admiral Nimitz was able to see a silver lining in a situation and circumstance where everyone else saw only despair and defeatism. President Roosevelt had chosen the right man for the right job. We desperately needed a leader that could see silver linings in the midst of the clouds of dejection, despair, and defeat.