Most of the people who lived, first hand, through the attack on Pearl harbor are nearly 90 years old. That’s very hard to believe. The surprise attack left young men, barely more than boys, running for guns, weapons, anything to fight back with. Many heroes arose that day. Not all of the heroes lived to bask in the glory. Some died and some were sealed in a watery tomb at Pearl Harbor.
About 100 of the survivors will attend the ceremony at Pearl Harbor. The ashes of one of the sailors will join the rest of his crewmen who never made it back from December 7, 1941. Approximately 2,390 Americans were killed during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
According to Voice of America:
Memorial events marking the December 7,1941 attack are being held throughout the country, the largest being on the Pacific island of Oahu, Hawaii, where the attack took place.
A dwindling number of Pearl Harbor survivors and World War Two veterans are among the 3,000 attendees expected at the event overlooking the USS Arizona Memorial, where the submerged remains of the fallen battleship rest. A moment of silence will be held at 7:55 in the morning , the exact moment Japan’s Imperial Navy began the surprise attack.
If you know someone who was at Pearl Harbor, run, don’t walk to talk to them and ask them to tell you of their experience. Even if you know someone who was an adult on December 7, 1941, talk to them. Find out what they were doing when they first heard the news. Where were they? What did they think? Did they ever think how much the news would alter their lives and the lives of their family and friends? There is so much I now want to ask my parents and grandparents. Opportunity knocked and I didn’t go to the door. They are no longer living so I can’t ask them.
From what I could gather from my relatives, they really were innocents who had no idea what the impact a world war would have on them, the family, and America. Pearl Harbor Day is much more than the 9-11- like attack on an unprepared nation. Pearl Harbor marks the change of an isolationist, fairly agrarian country into a world super power. The change was almost instant, and we were never to return again to those times before Pearl Harbor.
What memories do you have of your family members telling you about that day? Did you have family members who served? Did they all make it home?
Let’s not forget Pearl Harbor and those who who were wounded or died. Let’s not forget those who altered their lives and threw themselves in to a war movement unequal to anything this country has ever seen before or since. There is a reason that the ‘greatest generation’ got its name.
Shortly after 9/11 I saw the first of the “We Never Forget” bumper stickers on the back of a car. I had to smile at the irony. It was posted on the back of a Mitsubishi Montero. Mitsubishi made the Japanese Zero fighter planes used in the attack on Pearl Harbor and throughout WWII. If you look at our outright rage at the time against every enemy we’ve ever faced back to the Revolutionary War eventually we forget and we become good friends. I’m not sure what al Qaeda has to offer, but if history is any indicator it’s just a matter of time until we’re buying lots of it.
I guess it is time for me to drive over to the Jeep dealership to trade in my Mitsubishi. sigh.
Thanks for the reminder, Moe.
That’s easy: opium. And we already buy lots of it, just not legally.
@Cato the Elder
That’s easy: opium. And we already buy lots of it, just not legally.
That’s going to change when Ron Paul takes over the White House.
@Moon-howler
Moon – I don’t recall seeing a “We Never Forget” sticker on your car, so don’t do anything drastic. The irony with Mitsubishi is no more or less than survivors of concentration camps and their relatives driving cars made by companies that used them as slave labor or built materials for the death camps. There are some people who hold a grudge for a long, long time; we’re just not those people … at least not when our principle clashes with our personal comfort and convenience.
@Moe,
My mother did. She hated the Japanese until the day she died. She didn’t mind riding in my Mitsubishi though. Point taken. I would say she might have been too old to have known though. She might have ridden in mine but she drove a red Jeep. She was pretty true to her cause of hate. She would have been fired up today.
I think it was the treatment of our POWs by the Japanese that pushed her over the edge in to the non-forgiveness lane. Of course, she also told me she and the cousins all got a spanking if they said Abraham Lincoln when she was a kid. Charlottesville never forgets, I guess.
My father was appalled when my sisters and I as college kids bought VWs in the Sixties. Eventually he bought one himself but he sure knew how to harbor a grudge against the Germans at that time. He was actually the first in his family to buy a Japanese car.
When my mother and I were at the estate planner’s office today, one planner brought up the date and my mother said she’d never forget it – that she was a seventeen year old kid and the news was shocking. I’ll have to ask her for more details. My father, her boyfriend at the time, was already in the navy.
@Censored, my parents were engaged to be married the following June. My mother told me they had no idea, at the time, how life-altering Pearl Harbor would be. I am not sure what she meant. Woulda shoulda coulda asked and didn’t. We were discussing it in terms of 9-11. She did say that she hoped that my father and her father couldn’t see 9-11 and that ‘we’ had been asleep at the switch again.
I thought at the time, that was an odd way of looking at things.
About 15 or 20 years ago a friend who is a videographer interviewed my parents among many other people who attended a local event. They seemed relaxed enough on film that I thought of having my friend interview and record them for our family. She and I got involved in trying to launch another project and that family business got pushed to the wayside and never got done. My father died about ten years ago and my mother, without him as a buffer, gets prickly about answering some questions so I missed the chance. I have birthday parties and preludes to emergency room visits on tape but not what I’d like to have.
@Moon-howler
It sounds like both of us are guilty of ignoring that knock at the door, Opportunity.
Hopefully those younger than us will listen to us lament the loss of opportunity. Don’t think that you will get around to it. You probably won’t. Prioritize those times if you are fortunate enough to still have the opportunity.
I cannot tell you how many times my grandmother ‘bored us’ with talking about this that and the other from her experiences. My husband who has this love of history listened. I probably rolled my eyes and day dreamed. He is who gave her eulogy at age 105. No one ever saw more change in their lifetime than someone born in 1890 and who died in 1995. Oh how I wish I had listened more closely!
@Moon-howler
A few years ago my mother wrote a short autobiography in letters to me and my sisters. That’s the closest we’ve come to recorded history and, of course, didn’t include answers to everything we’re curious about. Sometimes you get a boatload of info by asking the oddest question or mentioning a subject.
Oh I remember that day–I was 8 and my brother was 6. I was reading the Sunday comics to him when the news came over our big Philco radio. We folks in Oklahoma had a vague idea of where Hawaii was–way out west in the Pacific Ocean somewhere. I remember my uncle going off to the Army shortly after the war started and I remember friends of my parents who also went off to war. We trained British pilots at the little airport in my hometown and to this day there is a small plot in the cemetery that contains the remains of several pilots who crashed during training. Rationing that included gasoline, tires, meat, sugar and other things. Everyone got a ration book with stamps for these various items and, in addition, you could save bacon grease and for every pound you turned in you got some meat stamps. We kids collected scrap metal for the war and Lucky Strike green went to war–prior to the war Luck Strike cigarettes came in a green package. Am sure getting rid of the green had nothing to do with the war effort but it made great patriotic advertising. People were made to believe that all the rationing was necessary and it may well have been but I think the main idea was, we civilians were making “sacrifices” for the war effort. That’t th e big difference in all our wars since–we have never been made to “sacrifice”–we have just gone on our way as if everything was OK. No real American “spirit”. What a shame.
George, thanks for sharing your memories. I hope you have recorded them for posterity. Anybody can go read what was said in Congress but very few people will ever be able to know the war memories of an 8 year old boy in Oklahoma.
Did you stop reading when you heard the news? Would kids even notice today?
That is an interesting theory about the rationing. Did many people think that? Sacrifices are never asked of us now. I wasn’t of a conscious age during Korea but nothing was asked of us during Vietnam, Persian Gulf of these latest wars.
I don’t remember if I stopped reading–I suspect I did, I vaguely remember my mother was in the kitchen and I suspect she was straining milk that my dad had just brought in after milking the two cows we had. Our big radio was one of those Philco floor models–my mother’s parents had a similar one that we would gather around on Saturday evenings and listen to shows like Fibber McGee and Molly, Fred Allen, Inner Sanctum, and The Shadow (Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts and minds of men? The Shadow does.).
Rationing may have been necessary, certainly for things that were imported, rubber being a good example. I am sure that rationing of manufactured goods was real since so much effort was converted from making consumer goods to making materials for the war. We were primarily an agrarian nation even this late. But people were very patriotic and pretty much seemed to take it in stride. I remember my mother and her mother saving the bacon grease and proudly taking it to the store to trade it in for red stamps, which allowed them to purchase additional meat. People really did plant “Victory gardens”–we didn’t have to since we were already living on a small farm. I don’t know for sure but I suspect we kids went barefooted a lot in the summer to save on shoes since they were also rationed. I also remember caskets coming into the railroad station–but I don’t remember anyone escorting them as we do today. I vividly recall seeing a casket setting on one of those big baggage carts more than once waiting for the funeral home to come pick it up. Even though we were about as far from the war as anyone could be, we had blackout drills and air raid wardens–my dad was one. Camp Crowder, MO was not too far from my hometown (Miami, OK) and at that time Route 66 was main street in my town. They would move soldiers from Camp Crowder down Route 66 in nighttime convoys and people were told to stay in their homes but you could the 6X6 trucks rumbling through town. I don’t know where they were going, maybe to some other training base or to somewhere to get outfitted to go to war. We kids played war–whittled toy guns and one of the best things we could get was some piece of memorabilia from the war–I had an American army helmet and a Japanese battle flag my mother’s brother sent me. In some ways they were halcyon days despite the inconveniences of a war. Being in the midwest blunted the effects of the war in many ways.
My mother didn’t speak much about that time. She had some memory problems, she said.
But, she did mention traveling across the southwest at 20 mph because that’s all the tires would take…working in western Washington state, in the desert….trying to talk my father into getting or buying the neighbor’s sugar rations and she would make gin…. that’s was rejected….. 😉 She was the daughter of a pharmacist and a Cajun. She knew how to brew up some moonshi…ummmm….medicinal alcohol.
Turns out my father was on the very fringes of a the Manhattan project…I mean the very indirect fringes…but it was enough to get him a job as a work crew boss.
The powers that were, in Washington(state) had hired a crew of black laborers from Mississippi, and they were….unaccustomed that culture….and were having labor problems with them. So they hired a Mississippian, thinking that he would be able to “handle” them.
So…as my mother told me…he found the ring leader of the strike. ..a huge man. My father was about 5’10” and slender. Found him and whacked him with a 2 x 4. Then, announcing that he was now in charge and asked what the problem was. When told that they had been hired, promised money, whiskey and some occasional women…and none of the last two had been forthcoming and the first was slow in coming…my father walked back to the office, laid the 2 x 4 on the desk and told the bosses that if THEY didn’t fulfill their promises….HE would lead the next strike.
After that…work got done. And they got paid.
She also told us about seeing the plumes of smoke from burning ships at the mouth of the Mississippi from New Orleans.