Then…and Since
I wasn’t around to witness it, but it has always been part of my memory, the background upon which so many of my impressions of the world were set: a surprise attack on an otherwise nondescript Sunday in December 1941. I bet I watched hours of the black and white film footage spliced into so many of the movies and TV shows that regaled 1950s audiences. Recollections shared by my parents became mental images I came to own, as did so many of us lumped together as Baby Boomers. And the sting of our unpreparedness reshaped how so many of us looked at ourselves, and everyone else, from that point on.
For those soldiers, sailors and airmen awakening on the ships lined up for easy pickings at Pearl Harbor, or answering the reveille call at Wheeler and Hickam air fields, it was just another lazy weekend morn in paradise. But at 7:55 a.m. the clear dawn sky suddenly popped with the black specks of an aerial swarm, the crimson zeros on their wings giving away their true intentions. The ear-splitting staccato of machine guns, the explosive compression of bombs and torpedoes hitting too many of their marks, turned the once-placid harbor into a cauldron of disorienting noise, suffocating smoke, and spilt blood. Before the hour had passed, a second wave of killer hornets descended from the clouds, and in just 110 minutes, a large portion of the U. S. Pacific Fleet had been decimated. Those who bore the brunt of the aerial envelopment—and those far away who heard of it on their radios—never saw it coming, nor fully understood what had hit them. America had been jolted as never before, and we are still feeling its aftershocks.
Admiral Yamamoto’s carefully conceived and stealthily orchestrated a force of 353 attack planes launched from six aircraft carriers poised beyond detection in the vast emptiness of the Pacific. Returning to their flight decks they triumphantly passed on the report of their raid: 19 naval vessels seriously damaged, including three dreadnoughts never to sail again. The USS Arizona, Oklahoma and Utah—the heart of our battleship fleet—were finished, their entombed crews a lasting memorial to this day of infamy. More than 300 of our warplanes were reduced to twisted metal and broken glass. Military hardware can be, and would be, replaced. It was the lives of those lost at Pearl, some drowned below decks as their battlewagons sunk, others caught in the hail of gunfire and brutality of burning gasoline—that were beyond recovering.
Like another day of infamy in 2001, our country was caught flat-footed and unprepared for what had happened on that December so long ago. The roster of those who witnessed it first-hand grows thinner with each passing day. Yet their legacy stays with all of us who remember them and who have taken to heart the painful lessons they were forced to learn that day. As most of us have become so fully aware in the past two decades, life after such an attack provokes explanations and reactions that few could ever expect or anticipate.
America then—before Pearl Harbor—would be almost unrecognizable to us born in the decades since. Then we felt safe and protected behind the oceanic moats that separated us from any European or Asiatic malevolence. Now we struggle to know if we are, or should be, in the business of protecting, policing, or saving a world that views us as either compassionate saviors or avaricious imperialists. Then we saw ourselves as a people joined by our shared civic values and lofty moral ideals of truth and justice. Now we tear at each other over who’s right, who’s left, who’s capitalist or socialist, who is or should be a citizen, whose lives really matter, what sex and gender really mean, when life begins and when life may be terminated. Then we mostly lived on farms and small towns linked by country roads, train tracks, telephone wires and radio broadcasts. Now more of us claim cities and suburbs as home, and jet from coast to coast while surfing the worldwide web on mobile devices without which we seem lost. Then work and marriage drew far more interest from high school grads than college, and professional sports was a part-time job. Hollywood was the guardian of civil language, modest sexuality in motion pictures in which heroism and happy endings were the norm. Now…I think you can fill in the rest.
Life has changed, the world has changed, and we have changed since the dawn’s early light of that Sunday morning in 1941. The historian Shelby Foote once offered this judgment of the Civil War that set the tone for Ken Burns’ groundbreaking documentary: It “defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.” I believe much the same could be said for December 7, 1941, and the war we entered in response. Pearl Harbor was a crossroads—perhaps the crossroads of our being in the 20th Century. In less than two hours it destroyed our pretenses about who we were in a world we were trying to ignore or avoid. And it defined what we became, and I would contend, what we still are to a large degree.
The never again resolve that Pearl Harbor imbedded so deeply in our national psyche set us on a course of hot and cold wars fought on every continent and now reaching into space. We ringed our foes with alliances, giving us acronyms we all once knew: NATO, SEATO and CENTO. We bolstered our defenses with radar and satellite systems to warn us of any approaching attacks. We developed a triad of strategic bombers, land and undersea missiles to deter any nation foolish enough to test our Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) promise. And we built the most mobile, lean, and sophisticated professional fighting force the world has ever seen, deploying it both to our credit and our regret. We even entered into league with those we once eschewed, hosting the UN in what has proved to be both a helpful and vexing collaboration.
I’m thinking about all of this on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Japanese attacks on our military bases in Honolulu. It now seems so long ago and far away as to be unreal, even if its few survivors remind us otherwise. Yet its ghosts still haunt our collective soul, their dying cries imploring us to never forget history’s lessons, some of which hold déjà vu implications for us today. Is Taiwan becoming our new Manchukuo? Are the troops massed on the borders of Ukraine too reminiscent of the Wehrmacht waiting to lurch into Czechoslovakia and Poland? Will the lines in the sand our leaders are inclined to draw prove to be warnings born of conviction or threats issued from weakness? Only time will tell how much the sufferings endured and lessons taught at Pearl Harbor will continue to shape our outlook and inspire our resolve.
Then…and still—we must never forget.
