The 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor
[NOTE: This is a somewhat-edited version of a previous post.]
Today is the eightieth 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 and almost gone. But they were the ones we still call “the Greatest.”
I was reminded of this a few years ago 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.
On the 75th anniversary there were 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.
Obviously the number of Pearl Harbor veterans alive has only gotten smaller since that was written—as it will every year until the number is zero. And then, we will still remember? In fact, do most of us remember Pearl Harbor now?
I’m not really sure what our younger generation today remembers, or wishes to remember – or through what strange leftist prism it will be taught to remember that day if it’s taught at all.
Here’s a post I published twelve years ago on Pearl Harbor Day. It focuses on FDR’s famous speech afterward, and the will and resolve he amply demonstrated.
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.
“Righteous might.”
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. That draft read “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.
Along with WWII veterans, many of whom I knew well, history is disappearing in this new “Woke” world. Education has collapsed into indoctrination and parents are fleeing public schools. It is time for vouchers for all. The teachers’ unions are as malignant as their Democrat Party has become. Unfortunately, the “Greatest Generation,” scarred by war and the Great Depression, vowed that their children would not know the hardship they experienced and produced the “Baby Boom” generation who destroyed their legacy. That generation has produced the current crop of idiots. God help us.
Sent my 17 year old Nephew a txt today reminding him of the date. At 80 years though, it’s significance is being lost , just as WW1 has. WW2 was my grandfather’s war. It was part of my family’s still living memory when I was growing up. They were still playing WW2 movies a lot on TV when I was growing up.
These days on social media, you are like likely to see Antifa claiming that the much later D-Day invasion of Europe was “ The largest Anti-fascist invasion in history” , as if Antifa is actually against fascism. Antifa, who attack people waving the American flag and claim they are “ Fascist” for being patriotic, ignorantly claiming to be equivalent to the men who actually fought against Fascism.
Pearl Harbor? Honor? Infamy?
Gurls of all 57 genders juss wanna have fun. And feel safe. And attended. And have you pay for it. Nothing else matters, or should, as they see it. “They”, meaning those who upon final analysis reduce themselves to Aristotle’s infamous grazing animals.
Where it all came from, who made the good they enjoy possible, how it is sustained what they might owe in terms of moral obligation; none of that matters.
There are feelz to be feeled, sass to be sassed, and likes to be chased. The soy boys, the fish-mouth pose yoga pants wearing selfie crowd, the trans whatevers enjoying a story hour with your toddlers – all the same root, if not branch.
Now … for all the bad that the Internet has done (along with the great amount of instrumental good) is the almost spiritual good it has done – if a brutal revelation of the truth is a spiritual good – by revealing just what shallow and soulless appetite entities a large proportion of humankind expresses as, if left to its own preferences or nature.
It is not a pleasant sight, or comfortable knowledge, but it is necessary to know.
The men of the Pearl Harbor generation discovered to their great cost and sacrifice what conscienceless self worship looked like when it manifested as an attack on Pearl Harbor.
We are now getting an unexpurgated view through the lens of social media of what degenerate appetite and self-worship looks like when manifest by a significant proportion of our own population.
And of course, this uninhibited manifestation of their inner beast, has spilled into the offline, into the real world of our daily lives.
We survived the first Pearl Harbor. There may however be no coherent “we” left, to deal with the mortal social assault that has revealed itself as manifest on our shores today.
That generation has produced the current crop of idiots. God help us.
Not sure which idiots you have in mind.
The abrupt decline in the mental stability of the collegiate population is concentrated among creatures born after 1995. The median vintage of their parents would be the 1969 birth cohort, deep into Gen-X. The cohorts who broke massively for the Democratic Party after 2004 and who bedevil their work supervisors today are around age 33 + / – 8 years. The median vintage of their parents would be the 1958 birth cohort. The size of birth cohorts had by 1958 already begun to decline, no one among them was ever subject to military conscription, and the collegiate population among them post-dated the era of student protests; referring to people of that vintage as ‘boomers’ generates confusion.
In any era, people occupying senior executive positions tend to be in their late 50s, i.e. people born in 1964 + / – 8 years. What’s odd about our present moment of corporate wokery is that people of that vintage tended to vote Republican in their late adolescent / young adult years; I guess the young Republicans never got past middle management.
Actual Boomers (b. 1938-57) generally have one thing in common: they’re retired.
Art Deco,
My guess is CEO political philosophies would correlate significantly by industry or rather than by age. CEOs of petrochemical-centric companies in Texas, Oklahoma and West Virginia probably often politically align, as do CEO’s of service companies in Silicon Valley, Manhattan and Chicago.
I don’t remember the Pearl Harbor attack, although my wife says that she does.
I served with one PH vet back in the 60s. Ironically, we were based in Pearl Harbor. He was in the PH signal tower during the attack. This sat on top of a huge water tower, so he had a ring side seat for the whole event. He said that they had a flag hoist for an air raid (the Navy communicated a lot by flag hoist combinations in those days.) No one remembered the coded sequence of flags, so they hoisted A-I-R R-A-I-D. I doubt that anyone noticed.
Although the attack itself escaped my consciousness, I was certainly aware of its aftermath. The intensity of focus across society from that day forward was almost unworldly. I think I was conscious of it, but did not fully appreciate it at the time, being between the ages of 6 to 10 during the war years. I do appreciate it in retrospect. I don’t suppose we will ever witness anything like it again.
While our armed forces fought valiantly, and many made the ultimate sacrifice, I am astounded when I reflect on the energy and productivity of our industrial base, and the folks who rallied to it. How could a society that could accomplish such miracles become so bloated and inefficient in such a short time? That is a rhetorical question. The answers are in plain view.
Today I remember my Dad even more. He was there.
Some of the Arizona survivors–many were ashore, it being Sunday–who got through the war wish to be buried in the Arizona.
With their shipmates. Imagine carrying that your whole life.
There’s a ceremony at the Memorial, and Park Service divers take the urn down to position it within the ship.
The divers say it feels as if the ship is pulling her sailors in. Which I suppose she is.
How could a society that could accomplish such miracles become so bloated and inefficient in such a short time? That is a rhetorical question. The answers are in plain view.
Actually, we produce goods and services far in excess of the capacity we had in 1941, and that’s true in all sectors of the economy. What’s changed has been how robust and serious are social and political institutions. Congress in 1945-47 managed to cut the military budget by 80%, demobilize 90% of the men in uniform, and balance the federal budget. Unlike Britain, we in this country dismantled price controls and rationing right after the war. There was some residual inflation during the post-war period which the Federal Reserve acted decisively to suppress in 1951-52. Imagine the clown car denizens in Congress and the White House accomplishing this today. Keep in mind that the president of the time wasn’t some platonic philosopher-king; he’d played piano in the whorehouse of Kansas City politics for 20 years and never saw anyone go up the stairs; he counted Boss Prendergast and his sons among his dearest friends. He was, however, the right man.
After her death, our aunt told us that our mother had a beau on the USS Oklahoma – a very appropriate boat for an Okie with an Okie girlfriend to serve on – who got killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. That reminded me of a Kate Wolf song about another Okie: “In China, or a woman’s heart, there are places no one knows.” Just as we didn’t know about our mother’s dead beau.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14siRMH-9Uo
Art Deco, did you mean to say that we produce services, while importing goods from China far in excess of what we did in 1941? Actually, I expect that we do produce more since our population is about 3 times the size.
BTW, we had relatively little industrial capacity in 1941, but an enormous capacity by 1943 or 1944.
The other thing is the country was not only producing major “goods”, such as bombers and aircraft carriers, in mind boggling numbers at home, it was simultaneously building infrastructure all over the world to support the war effort. In 1942, or early ’43, my Dad was in Brazil building airfields for the Army Air Corps. By 1945 he was a Sailor aboard a Navy attack transport off of Okinawa. A family friend was a rail road engineer running war supplies from Persia (Iran)to Southern Russia on a U.S. operated rail road. Incidentally, the U.S. built 200 tunnels among other upgrades so that railroad could carry the war supplies. (https://militaryartifacts.blogspot.com/2011/07/copper-plate-persian-gulf-command-ww-2.html)
David Goldman on the next Pearl Harbor:
https://asiatimes.com/2021/12/us-military-minds-still-stuck-in-pearl-harbor-mentality/
The US Military is fully geared up to generate promotions and lucrative post-retirement gigs at military contractors and in the wider defence industries. Operationally, It is an exquisitely beautiful and effective machine for making rocks bounce in the Third World. Peers with standoff capabilities to take out a CVN or knock out the GPS constellation, oops. But yes, let’s build more CVNs because otherwise how are the guys in the aviator sunglasses going to make admiral? That’s pretty much the rationale for these things. Oh…they’re good prestige tools for impressing dusky natives. That’s why you gotta have two or three of the things. Max. (*)
“BTW, we had relatively little industrial capacity in 1941, but an enormous capacity by 1943 or 1944.”
The USA was the manufacturing powerhouse of the world in 1941. No other nation came remotely close to it. Re-armament had already been going full steam ahead for several years.True it expanded this base massively during WWII.
Today there is very little manufacturing base for the big heavy stuff or the small stuff that goes beep… and there won’t be 4 years in which to train Rosie the Tattooed Tranny how to rivet. More like 30 minutes.
(*) North Koreans might just give a damn about CVNs, to be fair. The last time a CVN parked itself in HK for R&R was about 3 or 4 years ago — unlikely to be happening again anytime soon. One option for my commute to HK Island is by high speed ferry. Some of these are open upper deck when it’s not rush hour. Happened to be on one and two Norks were clicking away with some very long lenses as we went past.
Art Deco, did you mean to say that we produce services, while importing goods from China far in excess of what we did in 1941? Actually, I expect that we do produce more since our population is about 3 times the size.
No, we produce goods as well. Industry accounts for a smaller share of the workforce and a smaller share of total output than it did in 1970 (or 1940), but there has been no absolute decline in industrial production.
BTW, we had relatively little industrial capacity in 1941, but an enormous capacity by 1943 or 1944.
We had ample industrial capacity in 1940, it’s just that only a modest fraction of it was devoted to military equipment.
Today there is very little manufacturing base for the big heavy stuff or the small stuff that goes beep… and there won’t be 4 years in which to train Rosie the Tattooed Tranny how to rivet. More like 30 minutes.
Gross output in manufacturing in this country is currently running at $5,500 bn a year, or about 15% of total gross output. Durable goods account for about 1/2 that.
OK. So build me a shipyard and lay down the first keel on April 1, 2022 (sic).
Can’t do it. That’s the kind of tempo the USA was capable of back in the glory days.
RTF…”My guess is CEO political philosophies would correlate significantly by industry or rather than by age.”
I think this is true, also, the geographical location of the industry is a factor. The location of some many ‘tech’ companies in California has likely had a significant influence on the attitudes of their executives and employees.
Shamelessly stolen from Z Man Comments thread:
“Interesting history fact for Dec 7th – America is as far from Pearl Harbor today, as Pearl Harbor was from the beginning of the American Civil War.”
There’s an interesting book, ‘Men and Volts at War’, which is a history of the General Electric Company in WWII. One story: the company was required to build a turboelectric propulsion system for a new class of destroyer escort vessels. (The usual geared-turbine approach could not be used because all the relevant gear-cutting machines in the country were fully employed). In a period of nine months:
–a new factory was built
–equipment was acquired and installed
–workers were hired and trained
I’m afraid if we tried to do this today, it would take more than nine months to resolve the political disputes about which state the factory should be located in. Then there would be another prolonged dispute about the required mix (ethnic, gender, and sexual-preference) for the employees. And finally, some kind of environmentally-related litigation.
My WWII Army veteran Dad absolutely embodied that “great moral strength and a kind of Gary-Cooperesque stoicism and understated bravery”. I’m certain that, along with the unashamed patriotism then prevalent, the hardships those generations lived through during the Great Depression inculcated those characteristics in the Greatest Generation.
Born in 1922, he told how when he was 8-10(?) my grandmother sent him with his little red wagon to a Brooklyn breadline to get some rice. He got to the end of the line and when the men already standing in line saw him, they moved him to the front of the line where he got some bags of rice. For an entire week, the family of six only had rice to eat.
Highly recommended: “Victor Davis Hanson “Misremembering Pearl Harbor”
https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/05/misremembering-pearl-harbor/
Prof. Hanson dispels several myths that I had always accepted; that FDR’s oil boycott of Japan led to the Japanese concluding that war with America was necessary to continue their military expansion and that Yamamoto was reluctant to go to war with America. Turns out both are untrue.
Come to think of it, I wrote a post in 2006 titled Like Swimming in Glue:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/4435.html
I don’t think the situation has improved since then.
Zaphod @ 6:50pm,
Wow! It’s obvious when one reads it, but it did not seem that way in my brain at all. My parents were closer to the Civil War than my grandkids are to WWII.
Wow!
The Empire State Building was constructed in 410 days.
The U.S. built 300,000 aircraft between 1941 and 1945. I believe we were making 40,000/month in 1945.
A friend of mine bought an older home in Aiea Heights a few years back. She is a former military pilot and when she had the old wooden floors refinished she had a piece of the Missouri’s deck spliced in. If you stand on that piece of wood in front of the picture window you are looking straight at the Arizona Memorial.
Everyone who lives here knows how beautiful that Sunday morning was, the clear light, the air cool and soft. Green mountains, blue sea. The way God made it. Until.
Hawaii people will never forget.
Another video by VDH about Perla Harbor. Packs a lot of info about Dec. 7th and WWII into a short vireo courtesy of Prager U.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIH5WjT3b2U
I noticed FDR took a drink of water part way into that speech. Marco Rubio can only wonder.
Edward Shames, the last surviving member of Easy Company, the “Band of Brothers”, died at age 99 just the other day.
I’m glad that my father was just a little too young and missed the war entirely.
I wove some of those memories of Pearl Harbor, and of my mothers’ family’s very worst Christmas (after Mom’s older brother was killed on a mission to bomb Germany in 1943) into a short story – “Radio Silence”
http://www.celiahayes.com/archives/3542
Some years after both Mama and Papi passed away, Adi’s first cousin Roman and his wife celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary with a trip to Hawaii. Roman and Conchita went to the Arizona Memorial, and surreptitiously left a bouquet of fragrant white plumeria flowers floating on the water – water still streaked with oil leaking from Manolo’s ship, iridescent streaks which the locals said were the tears of the ship, crying for her lost crew. Roman and Conchita also went to the Punchbowl Cemetery – they brought back pictures. Adi is certain that Manolo is buried there, among the unknowns from the Arizona. After all this time, it hardly matters, really. But she likes to think of him, the strong young sailor in his white uniform, with his hands and fingernails from which the oil and grime of working engines would never quite be cleaned. She likes to think of him, walking among the palm trees and the plumeria and frangipani scenting the tropic air, the blue water and white foam, crashing on a sugar-white strand.
Now and again, Adeliza Gonzales-Gonzalez, who has not been called ‘Adi’ in years thinks she has seen Manolo, in a magazine picture accompanying some story to do with the Navy, or a sailor half-glimpsed in a television newscast. She is very careful not to say anything about this, of course.
David Foster: “Come to think of it, I wrote a post in 2006 titled Like Swimming in Glue”
It’s possible to get things done quickly, but there must be an overwhelming reason to dispense with environmental and safety rules.
On May 23, 2013, a span of the I-5 Bridge over the Skagit River collapsed. This bridge normally carries about 71000 vehicles per day. There was a detour put in place, but it was very disruptive of the I-5 traffic flow as well as traffic flow in the local communities where the detour was located.
An emergency was declared, and all environmental rules were set aside. The bridge upstream that was, used for the detour had been built a few years earlier. It took almost two years to complete after all the environmental studies and precautions were taken. Experts opined it would take nine months to a year to get the bridge fixed and back into service. So, they turned the engineers loose.
“The collapsed span was temporarily replaced by a pair of two-lane bridges manufactured by ACROW, which were rolled onto the existing bridge piers. It went into service on June 19, 2013.”
Then another engineering firm went to work and built the permanent replacement alongside the temporary span. “It was built alongside the temporary span without interrupting traffic and moved into place during an overnight closure on September 14–15, 2013.”
Twenty-seven days to get the temporary span in place. Another eighty-eight days to put the permanent span in place. Not bad. All made possible by foregoing environmental studies, environmental damage precautions, extreme safety rules, lengthy contract negotiations, union only rules, political in-fighting, and the usual back door deals/profiteering. We still have that ability. It’s just being held back by unnecessary regulation and over burdensome bureaucracy.
J.J., great story about the bridge.
Richard Aubrey, that is such a moving story about survivors being buried at the Arizona. I didn’t know that they did that. It is very touching indeed.
The other thing I would like to comment on is this:
How many Americans know that Pearl Harbor attack was just one of several simultaneous attacks by Japan against the US in Guam and The Philippians, against the British in Hong Kong, Singapore and the Malay Peninsula.
I can only imagine that hearing the news at that time about several attacks must have felt much like we, our current generation, must have felt with the 9-11 attacks happening in several places as well. With the difference being that the Dec 7 attacks were so widespread across Southeast Asia and the Pacific and the 9-11 attacks being so devastating because they were attacks on the US homeland.