"December 7th, 1941" Topic

Pearl Harbor …

Never forget …

I only heard one radio station this morning mention it. People are forgetting, unfortunately.

Not over here they have not. Well some of us anyway. A Day of Infamy.

Funny thing. For so long the official US view was to suppress any memory as a shame, a disgrace, for being caught so napping. Relics of Arizona were dumped in a local scrapyard after dismantling and are still rusting away in a prohibited area.

For a dozen reasons it was a miracle, unless you were trapped in the capsised Oklahoma, or died weeks later in the Virginia unnoticed.

Do not forget. I can't believe no channel on cable or local isn't showing "Tora, Tora, Tora!" perhaps the best historical movie ever made.

A side effect of 9-11, the same way Kabul lessens the impact of the fall of Saigon. When you keep doing the same things wrong, the individual examples lose something.

Like our movies, even our mistakes feel warmed over.

Still, this is a major, major event in US history. Seems like we should be more aware of it today.

Most of my students had no idea what today was about, and none of them were even born when 9/11 occurred. Learning about something is just not the same as living through it. Probably why history recycles.

I never forget December 7th because it is my younger daughter's birthday. She was 18 yesterday. 18 years ago I suggested to her mother that we call her Margarita, which is Latin for 'pearl'. When she found out that I wanted to name our daughter after an infamous sneak attack, she took against it for some reason, I can't think why.

If it had been a boy I would have suggested Lance, because Long Lance obviously. I might have actually got away with that one.

Truly a fateful day. RIP the fallen, may we never forget them.

I think that has more to do with the Navy view of it than the larger government, DH: it was far too significant an event to ignore, and too far reaching in its impacts for that. The armed services certainly waged a bitter internal war over it that outlasted the actual war, though. In those days, they didn't do commemoration in the same way we do today.

But as a domestic cultural event, it was epochal. My grandmother had a brother on the Maryland, and thirty years later you could tell from the way she spoke what a shock it had been, and how her mother had reacted when the telegram came in- not sure what it contained (a message saying he was OK, as it happened). The shock of Pearl Harbor, and the exposure of an entire generation to military service made the Second World War what it was to America- an experience on a par only with the Revolution and the Civil War.

Every local news station noted the date, covered local
remembrance services, did interviews where possible and
covered National memorial services as well as those at
the USS Arizona. History Channel showed a black and white
story of the attack and afterward that was made during
the war.

TCM did show From Here to Eternity. Tora Tora Tora is posted on You Tube – I sent it to everyone at work with an explanation.

Dates that really count must include December 7th, June 18th and November 22nd. I should include D-Day June 6th, but that ignores all the folk who landed a day or so later and fought and died, not to mention every other theatre of war back then.

Tora Tora Tora is brilliant (even with the weird scene on Akagi in the BluRay version).

A lot of the tenor of that war was set on that day. It was far more shocking than it would be today to the America of 1941, which in some respects was still in the Victorian era, when it came to a quaint optimism about the world.

When I was growing up, the generation that fought the Japanese were our grandfathers, and you can take it from me, whatever they thought about the Germans was nothing compared to what they thought of the Japanese. It would have been bad even had the Japanese refrained from all the practices that earned them history's first nuking (brutality to prisoners, refusal to surrender, mutilations, maimings, etc).

I'll never forget after my future Father-in-Law gave me his account of the attack and getting strafed twice by a Zero running across the landing strip at Kaneohe Bay the first time I met him. His friend John Finn was the first US serviceman awarded the MOH.

My wife and I were able to get on the Kaneohe base and walk the area and Catalina hangers where her dad was on that day. It's a Marine base now.

Her dad was surprised that I knew all of the details of the attack and when he was on Guadalcanal with a Navy PB4Y1 Squadron. His squadron commander, Cmdr Bruce Van Voorhees, was also awarded the MOH bombing of a Japanese communications facility on Rabaul. His squadron lost one-third of their crew and planes before they rotated off. So many other great stories too. I miss him. I'm honored that he told me he had never mentioned these experiences to anyone else.

After spending an afternoon with him I decided I was going to marry his daughter, with his permission, and have her bear my children, the best decision I ever made. Fortunately, he said yes even though I am a Marine.

One last story about Dec 7. Two weeks before the attack his squadron commander called him and another Radio/Radarman from his squadron into his office and asked which one was the best. He said they looked at each other and shrugged so the CO flipped a coin. Jim lost and the winner packed his gear and was transferred to Wake Island.

Jim had taken several trips in a Catalina flying boat to Wake Island and went up with the Marine commander Major Devereux to review the island defenses. They'd sit in the side blister window and Jim attempted to spot the artillery pieces. Devereux was satisfied when Jim could only identify the fake gun positions and not the real hidden ones.

While on Guadalcanal he got strafed by a Zero again on the day of the biggest air fight (forgot the date). An Army P-39 Airacobra dived down and chased off the Zero and saved him. In 2001 I was at a WWII fighter symposium and an Army P-39 pilot, Besby Holmes, was attending. I recounted Jim's story to him and he said he remembered the encounter very well. Shortly thereafter, Besby switched over to P-38s and was in on the Yamamoto raid. He was the first one to line up on Yamamotos Betty but his guns failed to fire so he was waved off. Besby also flew in Korea and Vietnam. Great guy!

Wolfhag