Exhibit traces events before, after ’41 attack
Artifacts chronicle Pearl Harbor raid
NATICK, Mass. — President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared it a “date which will live in infamy” — and three-quarters of a century later, relics from that attack conjure strong emotions.
An exhibition commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack that drew the United States into World War II is opening at a private, nonprofit museum west of Boston that’s open to the public by appointment.
The Museum of World War II’s “Why We Still Remember” display chronicles the mood in the U.S. and Japan leading up to and after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack by Japan.
Museum founder Kenneth Rendell suggests the themes — including the rising nationalism in Japan and the complacency in the U.S. to the growing threat in a part of the world few Americans understood — should resonate today in the times of the Islamic State group and other foes.
“We underestimated the Japanese terribly. Everyone was paying attention to Europe, no one was paying attention to Asia,” he said. “It explains a lot about why we were caught flat-footed.”
The exhibition, which runs through Jan. 7, features artifacts evoking the ambitions of Japan in the years leading up to the attack, when Japanese news accounts celebrated victories over China in the two nations’ battles in the 1930s.
Those pieces are contrasted with the island paradise of hula girls and beaches captured in photographs taken by U.S. servicemen stationed at Pearl Harbor, just west of Honolulu, Hawaii.
It is the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet. Then there is the attack. It involved more than 300 Japanese fighter planes and bombers and killed more than 2,000 Americans, wounded more than 1,000 others, and destroyed or damaged scores of U.S. warships and aircraft.
A glass display holds a piece of a Japanese plane shot down in the battle, as well as a copy of the first typed distress message sent from the naval base.
“AIRRAID ON PEARL HARBOR X THIS IS NO DRILL,” it reads.
The exhibition also reflects on the heightened fear and anger over Japanese living in America, and the experiences of Japanese families forced into internment camps.
As visitors complete the exhibition, they’re confronted with buttons, pins, stamps and other keepsakes produced in the wake of the attack.
All bear the national rallying cry: “Remember Pearl Harbor.”