Remember Pearl Harbor: 75th anniversary
Today is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the December 7, 1941 Pearl Harbor attack. The generation that reacted to it by mobilizing and fighting World War II is on its last legs. But they were the ones we still call “the Greatest.”
I was reminded of this while watching one of those Oliver North “War Stories” TV shows, about Pearl Harbor. It featured some of the elderly participants reminiscing about that long ago day. Before each one spoke, there was a photograph of him back in 1941: young, vibrant, handsome, full of life. Now they were ancient, and most only vaguely resembled their former selves. But they still transmitted great moral strength and a kind of Gary-Cooperesque stoicism and understated bravery as they told their stories.
At this writing there are still quite a few WWII veterans alive:
The Department of Veterans Affairs doesn’t have data on veterans of individual battles, and an alumni association for the battle disbanded in 2011, at the 70th anniversary, when it believed just 8,000 of the 84,000 uniformed Americans on Oahu during the attack remained alive. Since 2011, roughly half of veterans of World War II who were alive then have died, according to VA projections, leaving fewer than 700,000 alive today. Roughly 400 American WWII veterans die each day. The VA projects fewer than 3,000 veterans of WWII will survive to the 100th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and that may be optimistic…
A couple of facts: it’s become fashionable to believe that FDR knew about the attack in advance and let it happen anyway. But those 12/7-truthers are almost undoubtedly wrong. Roosevelt wanted to get us into the war, and he knew a Japanese attack was coming at some point, and informed his generals to that effect, but he knew none of the particulars in advance.
This idea of a government in cahoots with the enemy, willing to let innocent Americans die, keeps coming up again and again. A certain not insignificant segment of the population appears to favor such conspiracy theories, probably because we don’t like feeling vulnerable to sudden attack.
Here’s a post I published nine years ago on Pearl Harbor Day. It focuses on FDR’s famous speech afterward, and the will and resolve he amply demonstrated. Will and resolve in war remain extremely relevant these days. There are indications it may be on the upswing now, as it hasn’t been in a long long time.
Here is just a little bit of Roosevelt’s post-Pearl Harbor speech, in case we need reminding of what American resolve used to sound like:
”¦No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.
Here’s the speech itself:
The memorable phrase that began FDR’s address, “a date which will live in infamy,” wasn’t in Roosevelt’s earlier draft. It reads “a date which will live in world history.” That sounds like a high school essay; Roosevelt crossed out “world history” and added “infamy” in his own hand. He also changed “simultaneously and deliberately attacked” to “suddenly and deliberately attacked.”
Wise choices.
[NOTE: This is an updated version of a previous post.]
In the Mid-sixties, I served with a man who survived Pearl Harbor. He was in the tower that controlled ships entering and leaving port. It sat atop a huge water tower in the inner harbor. Thus, he had a ring side seat to the whole mess.
A humorous aside–if that isn’t too crass in describing a vignette that was part of that great tragedy. The signal tower had a particular flag hoist (how the old navy communicated) that signaled, “Air Attack”. In the confusion of the moment, no one remembered the correct flag sequence, so they just spelled out the word “Air Raid” with signal flags. I doubt that anyone noticed.
Over the past couple of years, I have lost the last family members who served in WWII. They were all heroes to me.
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I was on a destroyer home ported at Pearl Harbor in the late 1960s. My ship at the destroyer piers had a front row seat for the filming of TORA! TORA! TORA! Many Navy pilots took leave so they could fly in the movie. It paid a lot better than the Navy.
Obama gives FDR’s Pearl Harbor speech:
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/12/fdrs_pearl_harbor_infamy_speech_as_obama_would_deliver_it_today.html
I posted – several times over the years – a transcription that I did of the original newspaper clipping. A local LA reporter posted his reminiscences and first-hand account –
http://www.ncobrief.com/index.php/archives/120741-another-sunday-another-war/
The part that I always remembered – was that he and all his newspaper friends expected a war to begin, and soon.
They just didn’t expect it to begin in Hawaii.
Yeah, funny how with the passage of time they actually come to seem heroic is a sense which is not at all grandiose, but which conveys a certain masculine seriousness of purpose, sense of duty, moral gravitas and a confidence without glumness or pessimism.
These men had a clear sense of themselves and the world and right and wrong which no political figure or whining neurotic could intimidate out of them. They simply brushed that shit aside … as we should as well, I guess,
My father, a kid who quit high school to, with his Dad’s permission, sign up in the last year, and served on DEs and cutters in the Atlantic, is, thank God, still with us. Though his older brother who was in France and at the Bulge passed away the summer before last. Returning, it was down to business. Finish school. On to college. Maybe the Bureau or some other agency or a corporation. Wife and kids. No whining
I knew a couple of guys who had been on Iwo or Tarawa, and there was just a different and quiet quality about these fellows.
You know, taken as a class, these men don’t pose. They are serious but generally good humored. They are not frivolous or petty They don’t swear up and down, and they are not easily deflected.
I know plenty of somewhat older guys from the half generation just before mine who went to Nam, or were in the service in some other period, and they are just not the same category. Some are even … well there is no other word for it … punks.
I think that the experience of the Depression and war, and the drive to settle and raise families after it, formed these older men in a way that made the very notion of them modeling themselves after characters in books or plays or movies or political figures, just too ridiculous to posit.
I think that as a rule they were even better men than their fathers.
They are naturally authentic in a way few men are nowadays.
With Neo’s permission, from an largely inactive blog I once commented on.
The guy on the Bofors is “the old man”; the soldier in the Paris street last image, his brother.
A pilot friend of mine from a decade or so ago. On the right.
Don’t ask who the guy on the left is …
DNW:
Thank you for those.
What kids your dad and uncle looked like then!
DNW,
Thanks for the photographs. You are correct, my parents generation were of entirely different mettle than many in my generation, and nothing at all like today’s safe space snowflakes.
Oldflyer,
The last one in my family was my father in law who died 10/12/14. He was a PBY pilot in the pacific from New Guinea to Okinawa. All he would ever say was thank goodness for Truman and the atomic bomb. My father, 4 uncles, and 2 aunts served. Dad in North Africa and Italy, all my uncles in the Pacific campaign, and my aunts were nurses who were in France and Holland. Their generation came of age during the Great Depression and suffered the hardships and miseries of WW2 and as DNW notes came back and prospered through hard work and determination.
RIP
“I think that the experience of the Depression and war” – DNW
Those in my family of that era, servicemen and not, were a whole lot more “sober” about life, and far less worried about the things that occupy people in successively greater amounts in generations since.
Little things and family seemed to give them the greatest pleasure.
Perhaps they were “scared straight” in a way, concentrating their minds on the fundamentals.
A model we might well emulate and pass on to our younger generations.
Anyway, horrible times those, and, hopefully , not to be repeated.
You are welcome to “copy and save” any of the images for your files.
You might, I expect, want to file the Dachau pictures, which so far as I know exist only as these prints which I have scanned; unless the soldier buddy who gave them to him had other copies made and kept the negatives. I don’t think that he was holding the camera when he went into Dachau. Used to mention the ovens.
He was going to give them to a Holocaust museum which said they would be happy to have them; but I had them at the time, and after he died figured that the Holocaust museums of the world had all the snapshots they could ever use.
He had an interesting photo of a German jet fighter in a field. He used to mention that military intelligence would often be right on their heels, and would have stopped some of the things they were doing. As in sawing pieces off of the plastic canopy of a jet [probably Me262] fighter.
Most of these pics were unfortunately poorly exposed, and the developing overseas was probably haphazard. Lots of pictures of snowy townscapes and ruined buildings. I am surprised GIs in a war zone were able to get processing done at all.
Yeah, whatever it was, they were in many ways qualitatively different … in a positive sense.
Let’s hope we can somehow emulate their best qualities without passing through the same cataclysmic experiential forges.
@DNW – if you haven’t already, you might want to load them up on Amazon Photos (free), or elsewhere, just to back them up them online, and also share them if you like.
I know I’d like to see them. No such photos, if they existed, were passed down in our family.