A Day That Will Live In Infamy

[HudsonHawk]

72 years ago today, the Empire of Japan launched an attack on the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, precipitating the US's entrance into World War II. In addition to being a day of remembrance of all affected by this event, and the events to follow, this event (and the WWII years) often serves as a demarcation of many of the discussions around the FL. Many topics can be divided into pre-War and post-War, from the sartorial to the cultural to the socioeconomic. Without getting too much into the politics (just maybe a little history) of any of the events...thoughts?

 

[LizzieMaine]

72 years ago today, the Empire of Japan launched an attack on the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, precipitating the US's entrance into World War II. In addition to being a day of remembrance of all affected by this event, and the events to follow, this event (and the WWII years) often serves as a demarcation of many of the discussions around the FL. Many topics can be divided into pre-War and post-War, from the sartorial to the cultural to the socioeconomic. Without getting too much into the politics (just maybe a little history) of any of the events...thoughts?

Pearl Harbor should be seen in its proper context -- it wasn't a "sudden unexpected strike" by any means. Americans in general had been profoundly disturbed and disgusted by Imperial Japan's policy for years, especially since the atrocities committed by the Japanese in China in 1937, which were well-documented in the press and newsreels of the time. Organized boycotts of Japanese goods and relief campaigns on behalf of the Chinese had been common since then, and there was a sense that war with Japan was inevitable. The particular nature of the attack was a surprise -- but the fact of an attack itself was not.

The acts of the Japanese in China and Korea were every bit as horrific as those of the Nazis in Europe, and they must never be forgotten.

Meanwhile, not every American paid close attention to the events of December 7th. I once came across the 1941 diary of a nineteen-year-old girl from one of the towns near here -- and her entry for December 7th was, in its entirety, "Snowed a little. Went over to Florence's house."

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

[video=youtube;YFzjRjd_pz0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFzjRjd_pz0[/video]

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Meanwhile, not every American paid close attention to the events of December 7th. I once came across the 1941 diary of a nineteen-year-old girl from one of the towns near here -- and her entry for December 7th was, in its entirety, "Snowed a little. Went over to Florence's house."

Every now and then I've run across old diaries and the disappointing part is that you're kind of expecting something like the diary of Anne Frank with profound observations on the events of the day or a glimpse into the innermost soul of the writer, but instead many of them are remarkably banal. I ran across a woman's diary from the war years once and the June 6, 1944 entry gave only one terse line about D-Day (ho hum) and then back to the everyday minutiae. In fact it was the only mention of the war in the entire diary!

 

[HoosierDaddy]

My Father moved from Indiana to San Diego to design aircraft and was living there when Pearl Harbor was bombed. He told me the fear was that no one new what else was going to happen at the time. Almost immediately elaborate camo netting was installed at key points along the west coast. He put survival gear (along with a pistol)in a gym bag and kept it in a locker in his office. World events were very uncertain and this attack brought on more fear of the unknown.
HD

 

[A Bomber General]

HudsonHawk, you're right on point. Pearl Harbor is perhaps the most visible demarcation between America as it "was" and what it has become. It is impossible to understand the American character and society of the 21st century without an appreciation of how radically WWII (and the aftermath) changed this country. It provided an impetus for what became the civil rights movement. It drove us into space, and provided us with the power to destroy the world through nuclear weapons. It also fundamentally changed the relationship between the average citizen and the federal government, with all of the things that have developed from that. It forced into retirement the notion that the U.S. was an insular nation; before the war, the U.S. generally tended to its own affairs and left other nations to attend to theirs (with a few exceptions). Ever since the war, we have been hip deep in solving the various ills of the greater world. If WWII can be defined as a time when America became of age, Pearl Harbor can be seen as that horrendously traumatic first day of high school. I've interviewed many members of the "Greatest Generation," and many of them remarked that the general pace of life quickened with the coming of the war and it has only kept accelerating since.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I've interviewed many members of the "Greatest Generation," and many of them remarked that the general pace of life quickened with the coming of the war and it has only kept accelerating since.

This is a really good point, and consistent with what I've been told as well. I don't know what would have happened if not for WWII, but a change in the "pace of life" here in the US due to the event is certainly a very accurate description.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Some thoughts on the historical Pearl Harbor recordings that people will be hearing today...

The most familiar clip rolled out every year at this time, that of CBS's John Daly saying "We interrupt this program for a special news announcement, the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii by air..." is a simulation, made by grafting two unrelated recordings together. The "We interrupt this program" part comes from Daly's 1945 bulletin announcing the death of President Roosevelt, and the rest comes from Daly's reading of the lead story during the regularly-scheduled 230pm CBS World News broadcast. This simulation was created in 1948 for a record album, "I Can Hear It Now," narrated by Ed Murrow and produced by Fred W. Friendly -- and covers up the embarassing fact that CBS did not, in fact, interrupt regular programming for the first flash on the attack. When the flash came over the wires at 222pm Eastern time, the network decided to hold it until the regularly-scheduled newscast coming up in 8 minutes, and did not interrupt the current program, a variety series called "The Spirit of '41." Daly did cut into the CBS broadcast of the New York Philharmonic, which followed at 3pm, but not until the regular intermission period, and not with the first announcement of the attack.

NBC didn't interrupt its regular programming on the first flash either. They continued with Sammy Kaye's Sunday Serenade on the Red network and a Great Plays dramatization of "The Inspector General" on the Blue until 229pm, when they cut into both networks with a simultaneous bulletin, recordings of which survive thanks to a Memovox dicatating machine the network was using to log programming that day.

Mutual wasn't up at that time -- its stations were carrying local programming only. The only station in New York to interrupt for the first flash was WOR, which cut into a football game from the Polo Grounds with the 222pm flash. No authentic recording of this bulletin exists -- every version that's been circulated on historic compilations is a simulation.

All the networks *continued with their regular programming* thru the rest of December 7th. There was no switch to continuous coverage -- the bulletins were read as they came in, and periods of analysis provided, but the regular business of day-to-day sponsored radio continued thru the rest of the day and on into December 8th. There were only a few sponsors who even felt it appropriate to suspend their commercials, and there was a lot of criticism of this by people who felt radio's job was to be keeping people informed in a national emergency, not selling them Jell-o like nothing had happened.

 

[Foxer55]

HudsonHawk,

72 years ago today, the Empire of Japan launched an attack on the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, precipitating the US's entrance into World War II. In addition to being a day of remembrance of all affected by this event, and the events to follow, this event (and the WWII years) often serves as a demarcation of many of the discussions around the FL. Many topics can be divided into pre-War and post-War, from the sartorial to the cultural to the socioeconomic. Without getting too much into the politics (just maybe a little history) of any of the events...thoughts?

I would offer the opinion there are similarities between 12/7/1941 and 9/11/2001. We have seen the same disinterest by the public in the conflict and enormous changes are talking place in our culture in response to perceived terrorism. When I say 'culture' I mean basic cultural changes in our day to day life. So, will these changes be as noticeable in hindsight some 50 or 60 years from now? I think so. What will FL members be saying then?

 

[Guttersnipe]

Pearl Harbor should be seen in its proper context -- it wasn't a "sudden unexpected strike" by any means. Americans in general had been profoundly disturbed and disgusted by Imperial Japan's policy for years, especially since the atrocities committed by the Japanese in China in 1937, which were well-documented in the press and newsreels of the time. Organized boycotts of Japanese goods and relief campaigns on behalf of the Chinese had been common since then, and there was a sense that war with Japan was inevitable. The particular nature of the attack was a surprise -- but the fact of an attack itself was not.

The acts of the Japanese in China and Korea were every bit as horrific as those of the Nazis in Europe, and they must never be forgotten.

I certainly agree with this assessment.

It was actually a direct response to Japanese aggression that bought the U.S. Pacific Fleet to Hawaii in the first place, which had been based in San Diego prior to May of 1940. Japanese violations of Soviet boarders resulted in the Battle of Lake Khasan in 1938 and Khalkhin Gol campaign in 1939. Similarly to the south, in 1940 Japan placed troops at the boarder of French Indochina to block rail lines to China, and in September 1940, Japan actually invaded Vichy Indochina -- the colony of a nominal ally!

Given this background, it was clear that war with the Empire of Japan was inevitable. I'm not sure it can even be said that isolationism was any longer the prevailing sentiment in the United States by December 1941.

 

[Atterbury Dodd]

Interesting stuff to think about... Lizzie, I just had to comment about that diary entry you mentioned...as you say it's possible that this girl really did not care that much about what was going on... however, my family probably would not have heard about the 9/11 attacks until the late evening, or even the next day, due to the fact that we hardly ever watched TV at the time. We were all at home... the first person to tell us was our propane man. Just saying... we don't really know what was actually going on in this person's life on the day the entry was made.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The organized isolationist movement was in a state of utter shambles over the last half of 1941 -- the flood tide of that movement had come just after the 1940 election, and it started to slide after that, but a series of events in 1941 put the skids under it for good.

First problem was that they had a very poorly-organized fundraising apparatus -- no matter what people on the street said they believed, they weren't especially willing to support an organization representing isolationism, and the Firsters were dragging badly by the middle of the year. In late 1940, they had spent heavily on syndicated radio programs featuring various leading spokesmen for their viewpoint, spotting these on stations all over the country, but that got expensive fast, and they didn't attract much of a base from that campaign outside of the Midwest. They cut the budget for that campaign in 1941, and depended instead on mass rallies, which hurt them with people who might have agreed with what they said but didn't feel motivated enough about it to go sit in a hall for two hours listening to speeches. Their big rally in Des Moines, Iowa in September 1941 was a disaster -- they had convinced the Mutual network to broadcast it from coast to coast, only to have their star speaker, Charles Lindbergh, deliver a speech that sounded, to most listeners, to be overtly anti-Semitic:

No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.

Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not.

Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.

Lucky Lindy's luck ran out with that one, and with it the luck of the Firsters. They were a political dead-letter before December, and they officially dissolved the day after Pearl Harbor.

Granted, America First wasn't all there was to the isolationist movement, but even aside from them, sentiment was moving away from isolationist stances well before Pearl Harbor. By the end of 1940, polls showed that more than half of all Americans favored aid to Britain even if it brought the US into the war, and in 1941 Lend-Lease had a strong base of public support across the board.

It also didn't help the isolationists that the most popular news broadcaster on the air -- Walter Winchell -- was ferociously interventionist. He had been the first American reporter to publicly attack Hitler in 1933, and was even more relentlessly anti-Nazi in 1940-41. He was also very publicly Jewish -- and it's quite likely that he was one of the specific targets of Lindbergh's Des Moines speech. Winchell, for his part, continuously ridiculed Lindbergh in print and on the air as "The Lone Ostrich," "Herr von Lindbergh" and other such names, and as Lindbergh's public prestige fell, so did that of the movement he represented.

Most of the concern during 1940-41 focused on the European war, naturally enough, since that was where the breaking news was. But there was plenty of "and that goes for Japan, too" from the interventionist side.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Interesting stuff to think about... Lizzie, I just had to comment about that diary entry you mentioned...as you say it's possible that this girl really did not care that much about what was going on... however, my family probably would not have heard about the 9/11 attacks until the late evening, or even the next day, due to the fact that we hardly ever watched TV at the time. We were all at home... the first person to tell us was our propane man. Just saying... we don't really know what was actually going on in this person's life on the day the entry was made.

That's true -- and we should also keep in mind that just because we visualize people in the Era huddling around their radios waiting for the bulletins, there were still a lot of rural families that didn't have radios. There were also a lot of people who believed Sunday was a day for rest and religious contemplation, and that it was inappropriate to listen to the radio on the Lord's Day.

To be fair to my young diarist, her entry for December 8th says "Snowed a little. Florence came over. Listened to the President's speech."

 

[fashion frank]

Funny Isn't it !

What is amazing the most to me is how 72 years later they are one of our allies and trading partner, and they are now "bombing" us with Toyota's nowadays instead.

A good friend of mine who's father fought in that theater of war to this day hates the Japanise for what they did to our P.O.W.'s and for what he himself went thru.
I also agree with the comments that this country changed after that day just like it did after 9/11.

I havent been on as of late as we are moving this coming week in to our "new" 1925 home and I have been very busy.

http://www.newenglandmoves.com/prop...-1052136/100-Glen-Rd-Woonsocket-RI-02895.aspx

All the Best ,Fashion Frank

P.s. On a different note has anyone heard from that young lad "splinter cells" who is now serving our country?

 

[Atterbury Dodd]

Frank... a lot of World War II vets that fought in the Pacific are not well disposed towards the Japanese... I have heard several stories firsthand of what the Japanese soldiers would do to US prisoners, both soldiers and civilians. Japan today is a much different place... except that they do occasionally seem inclined to rewrite their history. Just a little story... I went into our small post office and on the bulletin board there was a piece of paper with several Toyota vehicles listed for sale on it. Someone had circled the Japanese vehicles and marked on the paper "J** junk! Remember what the little ye***w dogs did to us at Pearl Harbor!" I know at least one old veteran in town and I have my suspicious who marked it up this way...

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

One of the Facebook WWII groups I belong to has a number of Japanese ultra-nationalists as members and they... shall we say... have a rather unique spin on the Pacific War.

 

[Shangas]

Pearl Harbor should be seen in its proper context -- it wasn't a "sudden unexpected strike" by any means. Americans in general had been profoundly disturbed and disgusted by Imperial Japan's policy for years, especially since the atrocities committed by the Japanese in China in 1937, which were well-documented in the press and newsreels of the time. Organized boycotts of Japanese goods and relief campaigns on behalf of the Chinese had been common since then, and there was a sense that war with Japan was inevitable. The particular nature of the attack was a surprise -- but the fact of an attack itself was not.

The acts of the Japanese in China and Korea were every bit as horrific as those of the Nazis in Europe, and they must never be forgotten.

Meanwhile, not every American paid close attention to the events of December 7th. I once came across the 1941 diary of a nineteen-year-old girl from one of the towns near here -- and her entry for December 7th was, in its entirety, "Snowed a little. Went over to Florence's house."

A lot of things happened on December 7th/8th, 1941 which most people forget about. And Lizzie is right. You have to understand the attack on PH. It wasn't JUST to piss off the Americans or to get them into the war, or anything like that.

The Japanese had a MASTER PLAN. That plan was to colonise and invade the Pacific Rim and the Southeast Asian area of the world. And to do that, they had to remove all credible threats which might threaten this objective.

The Japanese wanted to add some big prizes to its growing collection of countries. They wanted Malaya for its rubber and tin. They wanted Shanghai for its port. They wanted the Pacific Islands so that they would have launchpads and runways for airplanes, and fuel and ammo-dumps.

But they couldn't get any of this without FIRST knocking out the Americans at PH. It's a testament to how significant a threat they saw the PH fleet to be, that they attacked PH FIRST, before invading Shanghai. You'd think that they could easily overrun a defenseless city living on borrowed time, and not worry about PH. But the truth was, there was a lot of foreign interest in Shanghai. Had they invaded the city first, the Americans would likely have sent a military task-force to deal with it.

So they knocked out the battleships first.

The same could be said of any other area of the Pacific. They had to knock out PH before, or at least at the same time, that they attacked Hong Kong, or Singapore, or Malaya, or the Philippines.

Attacking PH wasn't JUST to piss off the Americans. It was to help them take over the entire region unopposed.

1941 was a pivotal year.

Before 1941, the European War and the Asian War were more or less, separate entities. People on one side of the world didn't necessarily concern themselves with what was happening on the other side. People living in Australia, for example, were more concerned about the Germans than the Japanese. IF the Japanese attacked, Singapore would stop them.

1941 changed all that, and it brought both separate conflicts into one global duke-out.

 

[sheeplady]

I would offer the opinion there are similarities between 12/7/1941 and 9/11/2001. We have seen the same disinterest by the public in the conflict and enormous changes are talking place in our culture in response to perceived terrorism. When I say 'culture' I mean basic cultural changes in our day to day life. So, will these changes be as noticeable in hindsight some 50 or 60 years from now? I think so. What will FL members be saying then?

I think for older generations, this is very true. I see a very different world post-9/11 than pre-9/11. Most people in my circle do. However, our younger people were kids when 9/11 happened. It occurred to me one year when I was teaching (I used to do an assignment on 9/11 for my Risk Management Class- I taught in an IT and a business program) that most of the college students I was teaching were young pre-teenagers when it happened. If you are too young you can't comprehend the "pre" period, it is just history.

I wonder how much of the quickened pace has to do with the rise of the U.S. as a "world power." I've heard it said that it wasn't until after WWII the U.S. became a central player as a world power (mainly because our economic manufacturing was intact and we weren't decimated by fighting on U.S. soil- basically we were the only large highly populated country that survived without physical devastation). So the "quickening of pace" had to do with the U.S. taking center stage following the war.

I've also heard it said that the U.S. is no longer one of the top world powers because of the loss of manufacturing and population shrinkage relative to growing economies. Perhaps, then, WWII and 9/11 are two bookends on the U.S.' existence as being among the most powerful of a small handful of nations. Now we certainly have more players on the stage and many more emerging economies.

I'm not saying I agree with it fully, but it would be interesting to think about. Either way, I do think 9/11 is a huge historical event in our lives as "Americans."

 

[Shangas]

Completely unrelated, but your last comment made me wonder if 9/11 has yet to find a place in school history textbooks...

 

[vintageTink]

The acts of the Japanese in China and Korea were every bit as horrific as those of the Nazis in Europe, and they must never be forgotten.

Lizzie, I will preface by saying that I went to public schools, and the only reason I knew ANYTHING beyond the basics about WWII was because my grandfather fostered my love of reading.
Although the teachers did talk about how evil Germans (they didn't specify Nazis) are. Not were, are.

That said, I never learned anything about the Japanese atrocities until I married. My husband watched a movie called Unit 731. I was horrified when I learned that the Japanese had done these things to the Chinese, Koreans, and POWs!
Why do we not hear about the Japanese or the Soviets?
Why is it only the Germans that we hear about?

I was at Pearl Harbor for the 65th anniversary. Very moving.