The morning it all changed
The words are burned into American memory, and so is the criminal act they describe: “Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” So Franklin Delano Roosevelt informed the American people of the attack, 75 years ago today, on an American naval base in Pearl Harbor.
Seventy-five years matters not only because those numbers resound, but because ever fewer Americans who remember that Sunday are still among us, transforming “never forget” from oftrepeated mantra to urgent command.
Pearl Harbor teaches us of the brutality of war, of how suddenly and utterly it changes individual lives, the life of a nation, the fate of the world.
The Japanese carrier-based warplanes came with their bombs just before 8 a.m. in Hawaii, or 1 p.m. on the East Coast. As Americans heard about the attack on what was then a little-known base, its name quickly became synonymous with a treacherous and devastating sneak attack.
It has also come to evoke duty, honor and resolve. The Japanese thought their vile assault would force America to retreat and cede the Pacific while they conquered and subjugated the people of Asia, as their Nazi allies were enslaving Europe. Hitler, his murderous legions stopped at the gates of Moscow, thought America weak and decadent.
The warlords in Tokyo and Berlin were wrong. From the wreckage — 2,403 Americans killed, including 1,177 on the USS Arizona — arose an economic and military machine the strongest the world had ever seen.
Thirteen million American men in uniform and an astounding wartime industrial output, alongside Soviet, British, French and Chinese allies, rid the Earth of the twin scourges of Nazism and Japanese imperialism.
FDR wouldn’t live to see the end. But by 1945, when the U.S. Army marched into Germany and the Navy steamed into Tokyo Bay, a new world was born of the bloodshed.
As we recall the horror and tragedy, we salute that on that day, the world’s indispensable nation, battered but not beaten, got off her knees and saved humanity.