75 years after Pearl Harbour, U.S. must continue to lead

Sventy-five years ago, on Dec. 7, 1941, the United States entered World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

It was perhaps our darkest hour, to borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill.

In an attack that lasted less than two hours, 2,335 U.S. servicemembers were killed. Nearly half of those victims served on the U.S.S. Arizona, which sunk after a direct hit from a Japanese bomb.

The Arizona was one of seven battleships lined up and moored on "Battleship Row," and one of eight that were sunk or damaged during the attack.

On Dec. 8, President Franklin

ARoosevelt called on Congress to declare war on Japan, uttering the famous line that Dec. 7 would be "a date which will live in infamy." And so it has been these many years. Throughout the war years, "Remember Pearl Harbor" was a rallying cry for soldiers and sailors who fought in the Pacific. After the war, Pearl Harbour became synonymous with unpreparedness. We vowed never again to be so unprepared for an attack on our soil.

And we did remain vigilant until Sept. 11, 2001, when we were attacked by a new kind of enemy.

But Dec. 7 is a day that changed America and changed the world.

From our darkest hour, we became a s the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbour approaches, a survivor has recalled the horror of the bombing – and how he could see the bombers smiling and waving from the air.

Donald Stratton was 18 when he joined the Navy in 1940.

He was miles from his home of Red Cloud, Nebraska when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, off the coast of Honolulu, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941.

Now 94, he lives with his wife of 66 years in Colorado Springs. The couple have five children and five great-grandchildren.

But as a Seaman 1st Class, he had been stationed on the USS Arizona and was just 500 feet away from where a bomb struck the vessel.

In his memoir ‘All the Gallant Men,’ Stratton recalls how he survived the sneak attack that left 2,403 Americans dead.

In an excerpt shared with the New York Post, he reveals how he would have been among them had he not managed to escape to a nearby ship in the nick of time.

The morning of December 7, 1941 ‘seemed like any other,’ according to Stratton.

But then, when we walked out onto the deck, he saw his fellow sailors crowded together on the ship’s starboard side.

‘They were looking across the water at Ford Island, an islet in the center of Pearl Harbour, and they were hollering — planes with the Japanese Zero insignia were banking through the sky,’ he wrote.

They watched as the water tower on Ford Island was bombed.

‘We watched the tower fall and planes on the runway over there burst into flames,’ he added.

As an announcement over the ship’s public-address system urged everyone to man their battle stations, Stratton said it was ‘surprisingly calm, with everybody doing what they had been trained to do.’

His job was to get a range on where the planes were so they could be shot down.

‘All hell was breaking loose in the sky, and we were sitting ducks,’ he wrote.

‘There were so damned many planes, close enough that I could see pilots smiling and waving. They were doing their jobs, but I thought they were a**holes!’

As battleships around the USS Arizona were struck or sunk, Stratton said the air smelled ‘like burning oil, and the water was on fire.’

He added: ‘As each bomb hit us, the Arizona shuddered and seemed on the brink of collapse. Then the big one hit.

‘The Japanese got lucky. One of their 1,700-pound bombs hit a storage area that held 1,000,000 pounds of ammunition and 180,000 gallons of aviation gasoline.

‘That was 500 feet away from me, and I completely shook with the hit. A series of deafening explosions went off.’

Stratton said a ‘fireball — fueled with ammo and gasoline — suddenly went 800 feet into the air.’

It shot right through him and many others – and burned 70 per cent of his body.

‘My T-shirt became engulfed in flame and scorched my torso; hair on my head was burned away; my legs suffered serious damage. Somehow, I lost part of an ear,’ he wrote.

‘But my self-preservation kicked in, and I couldn’t think of dying as an option.’

The USS Arizona lost 1,777 men in just two hours and Stratton believes his fate would have been sealed had it not been for a ‘great’ and ‘heroic’ man called Joe George.

Geoge was a Boatswain’s Mate world superpower.

Winning the war and the following Cold War was a veritable good thing for the United States and the world. The relative world peace and prosperity we have enjoyed the past 70 years stem from that attack that brought us into a raging world war instigated by a gang of murderers and thieves.

The defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the perpetrators of terror and occupation of other nations at the time were not only defeated by the United States and the allies, but also rebuilt into the thriving economic engines and democracies they are today.

The steadfastness of the United States for 50 years after the end of the war until the fall of the Berlin Wall created the world we live in today.

The question before us now is whether we can adapt to face new dangers and threats to world peace.

There are natural rivals to us now – China, the European Union, Russia – but not nearly as daunting as the Soviet Union and the Communist Chinese under Mao.

And there are new threats from ISIS and their ilk. New threats, but really old ideologies of conquest and hate and extremism, ideologies we faced before and defeated.

The legacy of Pearl Harbour is that we are a nation that seeks peace, but once provoked we will fight to defend freedom on our shores and on the shores of others who seek peace and freedom.

Another legacy for the United States is that we must seek to lead if we desire a world that continues in peace and prosperity.

We have made mistakes. Vietnam is the prime example. And we will probably make other mistakes, too.

But the worst mistake we can make as a nation is to abdicate our leadership responsibilities to others or to step away from the turmoil and dangers of the world. The powers that rise to replace us will not be as kind, or share our vision and values.

It would be a tragic mistake to risk the peace and prosperity we won when plunged into the terrible war on Dec. 7, 1941, for the false comfort of isolationism at home.

To the question of whether the United States should remain the world's policeman, a former French nobleman once told me: "But you do it so well." We can rest assured, others will not do it so well.

No matter how much we may try to withdraw from the world, the thieves and murderers who seek the destruction of others and to rule over others will seek us out.

When we remember Pearl Harbor 75 years on, those are the lessons to remember.