Today is the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The attackers and the Americans they attacked are dead or in their 90s. A pivotal day in American history is on the verge of losing its last living voices.
The surprise attack on the United States’ principal base in the Pacific is commemorated as the event that propelled the U.S. into World War II. But the attack was also the high tide mark for the forces of tyranny dominating Europe and seeking to rule the world.
In the days before the Pearl Harbor attack, the German army found itself on the defensive for the first time deep inside the Soviet Union. Wehrmacht forces were within sight of Moscow when Siberian troops drove them back into the snow.
Germans and Russians would fight to the death for four more years just as Americans and their allies would battle the Japanese until September 1945. But Pearl Harbor shoved America into the war and flicked the switch that brought the country’s giant industrial arsenal to life.
Although bloodshed and battles would engulf much of the world between 1942 and 1945, the Japanese surprise attack, in the words of one Japanese master military strategist, woke up a sleeping giant.
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The attack also forced Americans to look across the Pacific and Atlantic and realize young men and women had to fight and die to free the world. High school students left classrooms and entered boot camp. Farm boys and city kids who never driven a car learned to fly bombers and drive tanks. Women working as secretaries got out from behind desks and started building ships.
The Americans who would lead the nation’s new legions hadn’t been in combat for years. Some of them had no combat experience while others had just suffered staggering defeats at the hands of the Japanese.
The Germans who swept through Russia and the Ukraine in 1941 were battle-hardened veterans who could match American industrial might with military experience. The Japanese warriors who attacked Pearl Harbor and rolled over British and American forces across the Pacific were masters of the dominant naval weapon of the mid 20th century: the aircraft carrier.
American ingenuity backed by Democracy’s arsenal turned the tide against the Japanese. But the battle for the Pacific was won one beachhead and one island at a time against tenacious foes so unrelenting they prompted Americans to unleash the dominant weapon of the late 20th century to finally end the war.
Pearl Harbor’s destruction and its significance is chronicled in history books, television documentaries and movies. But the spoken recollections of survivors — American and Japanese alike — have all but faded into history.
Few if any of them are left to tell their story and to remind their children and grandchildren about the horror of war and what it is like to be young and thrown into the crucible of combat.
Today we remember Pearl Harbor and resolve to carry on the memories of those who were there.