A Date That Will Live in Infamy……..

I was one week shy of my twelfth birthday, and I was visiting at my grandmother’s home in Tallahassee. Suddenly someone called out, and we rushed to the radio. It was early afternoon. The commentator’s voice was somber. The Japanese fleet’s bombers had attacked Pearl Harbor without warning!

None of us were sure where Pearl Harbor was. Finally an atlas solved the problem, and we settled down to glean whatever else we could from the sporadic newscasts.

The next day our President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, spoke before Congress. His message was short. It began “Yesterday, December 7th, 1941---a date that will live in infamy..” The voice that we had heard often during the country’s days of hard times as he communicated hope through his famed “Fireside Chats” was filled with resolve as he asked that a declaration of war be passed.

And it was passed, with one dissenting vote.

Through the next days and weeks the country awoke to fully realize the terrible losses that our fleet and army air force has suffered, not only in Hawaii but in the Philippines and in almost all of the lands that abutted the great Pacific Ocean.

Our way of life in the United States was altered. Even more altered was the way that our Navy was to fight war. The attacks on Pearl Harbor were on the battleships and cruisers moored side by side in the shallow bay, and on the supporting craft that were essential to the operation of the large ships. Battleship after battleship was sunk or disabled. The most famous, the USS ARIZONA, went down in shallow water, and today is a memorial. Other ships tried to clear the harbor entrance. One destroyer departed under the command of an ensign, the lowest rank in the Navy. He left his commanding officer in his wake as he took the ship out to safety.

When word got back to Washington about this early Sunday morning attack on Pearl, one high official said “You mean the Philippines, don’t you?” The vaunted “Yellow” battle plan, in place for years, was no longer valid.

Fortunately our carrier fleet, such as it was, was at sea. The Japanese war planner Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was counting on the carriers being in port, but they were not. This changed the way the Navy saw its mission. Heretofore the carriers were used to protect the battleships. Now they were the primary weapon of offense, and they carried the war very effectively to the enemy. The Battle of the Coral Sea, the Battle of Midway and other engagements were stories of our planes against their planes, each side seeking to sink or disable these mobile airfields.

We civilians back home followed the news carefully, with many young boys my age hoping that the war would last long enough so that we could take part in the action. We endured rationing, shortages, scrap drives and good and bad news for the next four years. The good news would be the battles that we eventually began winning. The bad news came as the names on the lists of casualties going to every city and town in the forty eight states.

We heard of combat heroes and watched newsreels of leaders pinning medals on young men with the “thousand yard stare” as they recalled Guadalcanal and Tarawa and Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Just before our invasion of Okinawa we heard of the most devastating weapon of the war: kamikaze planes. Named “divine wind” for a typhoon that had once saved Japan from invasion, these planes were flown by young men who intended to kill themselves, in the proud tradition of the Bushido code, and at the same time take with them an American warship. Our formations of ships protected the carriers in the center of a huge circle, with battleships and cruisers in the next ring and, finally, in the farthest out positions, a scattering of picket destroyers, the first ships to feel the brunt of the attacks.

One day Arliegh Burke, who would later become the Chief of Naval Operations, listened in on a radio transmission. It was from a young ensign on one of these picket destroyers. He was the only officer left alive. One gun was dismounted, the bridge was demolished, the ship listing badly. The young man said that the ship could make five knots, could still make steerageway and had two guns left in operating condition.

With a blend of horror, pride and pity, Burke listened to the conclusion of the young officer’s report: “I am an ensign. I have only been on this ship for a little while. I have been in the Navy for only a little while. I will fight this ship to the best of my ability, and forgive me for the mistakes I am about to make”. The communication stopped, and Burke never learned the identity of the man or the ship, but he never forgot his words.

In a book years later about the Korean War, the author asked: “Where do we get such men?” The answer, of course, did not need a\ reply. We got them from a free country with high ideals.

And we still get them there.



Remember Pearl Harbor!



(Note: This is not meant to be a comprehensive and historically accurate account of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is my personal recollections, beginning at the time that I, as an almost twelve year old boy, heard about it mid-afternoon on Sunday, December 7. It is also contains observations from my study of the War in the Pacific, which was largely a navy war).