December 7, 1941
We lived in a different America then. News that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor came from bulletins that broke into Sunday afternoon radio programs and was spread by word of mouth over the telephone, on the streets of cities and house to house in small towns.
World War II came to us in slow motion and seemed unreal until we read details in the next day’s newspaper and heard a broadcast of President Roosevelt telling Congress that that day would live in infamy as he declared a state of war with Japan.
Why, then, did that unseen war affect our lives so much more deeply than the 24/7 images and endless words about Iraq, which nevertheless is sliding out of the national consciousness now day by day?
World War II was everybody’s war. It would be fought by our fathers, sons, husbands, brothers and those of the people next door and down the block. I was 17 then, but in little more than a year, I knew I would be among them.
We were all in it together, and every night at 8:55, we turned on our radios for the only news most of us were able to get.
If we had been told then we would be called “The Greatest Generation,” we would have wondered what was unusual about doing what we had to do. It would have saddened us beyond tears if we knew that our children and grandchildren would ever have to fight and die when the nation’s survival was not so clearly at stake.
It would have broken our hearts then, and it still does.
Cross-posted from my blog.
14 Responses to “December 7, 1941”
It is truly sad that the American media and the American public have lost interest in Iraq, I think that it may be too mind numbing for the current generation of people to think about the fact that Americans are losing their lives in a war over there.
Americans should never forget that it is our people over there and that they need to be taken care of, even if it is a wrongful war.
One time I asked my mom which she thought was worse, 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. To my surprise, she said Pearl Harbor. She was 9 years old at the time & her cousin was at Hickam Field at the time of the attack.
Her 1st grandchild is currently fighting in Iraq & she thinks this war is the stupidest thing.
Robert, if you don’t mind me asking, what branch and where did you serve during WWII? My father and an uncle were in the Army, with my father seeing serious action in France and Belgium.
Pearl harbor has to be worse. What the Japanese thought they were doing is destroying the US Pacific fleet to further their aims in the Pacific. If the US hadn’t mobilized and rebuilt the fleet, history would be a whole lot different.
http://www.philipkdick.com/works_novels_mancastle.html Wouldn’t be a work of science fiction.
Comparing is a futile task, IMO.
Pearl Harbor was attacked by a country.
Iraq is the result of the US’s retaliatory attack on a country with no connection to the attack on the US by individuals representing an dieology, not a country.
The spirit of the past will not likely be resurrected in the future unless the unlikely happens and we can truthfully identy a country as the enemy.
Even then, the past could not really rise. The instantaneous broadcast of civilian casualties will confuse those literally watching the war, in a way not possible when news came slowly and in the form of print.
Also, the draft affected the public in a way,that a volunteer army can’t. Army cinnunites are largely segregated from the daily lives of those not involved.
Every time a change or a new invention is hailed as being for our betterment, we pay for the change by losing something of value from the past.
Sometimes it’s a good bargan, but sometimes not.
Every dondlict now is a PR war now. It’s frightening to see how bad at it the US is.
I think the attack on Pearl Harbor, being the work of an actual government which could pose an existential threat to America and our interests deserved much more alarm.
No matter how much bleating and babbling happens out in the press, the internet, talk radio or republican presidential debates, terrorists will never pose an existential threat to our country. Terror acts may kill batches of people, but they will never permit those perpetrators to take over our country’s law and replace it with sharia. Even had the US decided to still avoid entering into direct war with Japan and Germany it would have been a decade before they actually posed a risk of invading North America.
The Iraq conflict is not and should never have been deserving of our nation’s support, the lives of our military, fighting so rich guys can get richer.
“It would have saddened us beyond tears if we knew that our children and grandchildren would ever have to fight and die when the nation’s survival was not so clearly at stake.”
If there is such a thing as broken-hearted agreement,
Agreed.
Thank you for your abiding service Robert.
Thank you for remembering this day.
dr.e
I disagree. Imagine if on December 8th the US had retaliated against the Japanese by invading Canada.
“Why, then, did that unseen war affect our lives so much more deeply than the 24/7 images and endless words about Iraq, which nevertheless is sliding out of the national consciousness now day by day?”
Because in WWII the future of the nation was on the line in a tangible way. If we lost, it meant invasion and foreign soldiers raising flags over our capitol.
Iraq, like Vietnam, has little in the way of threat to our nation. We can afford incompetence in Iraq, bad strategies that don’t make any headway. Soldiers will die but Bush seems to lose little sleep over that. If we “lose”, we simply pull out and bring out boys home, but America goes on because this is a war of choice, not of neccessity. That is why WWII affected us more, and why this one is slipping out of the national dialogue.
What Lurxst said basically
Pearl Harbor’s analogue is 9-11, and World War II’s analogue is with the Iraq war. The difference is that this is a post-1945 war similar to Korea, Vietnam, and other wars (including unclear or unconventional objectives, not simply winning and getting out ASAP; Iraq is more complicated), and this involves threats to our interests which are material or are smaller than “European freedom.” It is further a war that was engineered differently than previous wars and which has featured much disgraceful behavior by our government.
No, DLS, Iraq is not an analog to World War II. Iraq did not attack us. They were not even in close cooperation with those who did.
Also, those who were responsible for 9-11 were just a bunch of saboteurs. Pearl Harbor was backed up by a highly industrialized nation, with a huge army, and a navy capable of invasion on a large scale, i.e. – an actual threat to the US as a whole.
Threats to our “interests” are whatever we say they are. Everything could technically be an interest to us, just as it could to other countries.
Yes, it is, obviously, even though al-Qaeda and the Hussein regime are not connected in 9-11. (Nobody has ever proven a direct, firm, positive relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda, much less such a relationship with the 9-11 attack.) The war was started after the attack; that sequence is the true issue. (The Iraq adventure is the principal event on all our minds, not Afghanistan, which neither you nor I mentioned and which was indirectly related to the party responsible for 9-11.) Incidentally, after the 1941 attack, we fought multiple adversaries, just as we have done in the 2000s, but I didn’t mention this because Germany and Japan were connected and cooperating and it just complicated things.
You can say the war was launched for all the wrong reasons (or for no valid reason), but the Iraq effort has been our main, major effort and the analogy holds. It’s merely imprecise or “coarser” than Pearl Harbor and World War II, for obvious reasons.
It was a proven threat to our nation’s interests, and had conducted an attack in the past that was a true threat to our interests (attacking and trying to annex Kuwait and threatening the Saudi oil fields). It also could have become an exporter of WMD or missiles or the technology for it someday. Even conventional warfare could threaten his neighbors (again).
But (unlike Vietnam) there wasn’t a larger, more powerful adversary that was using Iraq as a proxy or engaging in misadventure there, as could have happened at some time during the Cold War (but which never happened in Iraq). (Iran in Lebanon is doing much worse at this time, but this is a direct threat to Israel, not to the USA, though Israel is the other US interest in the region, other than oil.) The terrorists, al-Qaeda included, don’t count as “a larger, more powerful adversary” than Iraq.
Things are complicated there because we cannot permit terrorists to control Iraq and control the oil there and enjoy oil revenue (those guys are worse than Chavez in Venezuela as far as attitude and behavior).