Dec. 7 is a day to recall lessons of complacency
This morning there will be a quiet ceremony at City Dock. Members of the Fleet Reserve Club in Annapolis and a few others will pay their respects to the 2,400 lives lost in one of the worst reverses in American history: the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
But perhaps, too, there will be a thought or a word spoken to mark the life of one of the great men to come out of the world war that followed: George H.W. Bush. The 41st president was one of the thousands of young Americans whose lives were changed by that day, who went on to change the world.
Bush, who was buried Thursday in Texas after a national day of mourning, was a high school senior on this day 77 years ago. As reported in an Associated Press story this week, he was walking on the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, when he heard that the U.S. Navy base in Hawaii had been bombed.
In “Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush,” biographer Jon Meacham describes how Bush considered enlisting in the Royal Air Force because it would get him in the war faster. Instead, he finished school in June 1942 and enlisted right away in the Navy. He was 18.
One of the youngest pilots in the Navy when he finished his training at 19 — part of it on the Chesapeake Bay — he was assigned to fly torpedo bombers off aircraft carriers in the Pacific theater.
On Sept. 2, 1944, Bush flew out on a mission to attack a Japanese radio tower on the island of Chichijima. When his plane was hit, he told his two crewmen — William G. White and John Delaney — to bail out before parachuting out himself. Neither of the other men was ever seen again.
Splashing down in the ocean, Bush managed to make it into an inflatable life raft. A few hours later he was picked up by a U.S. submarine as he drifted toward Chichijima, where Japanese soldiers were later convicted of horrific war crimes against American captives that included cannibalism.
As Bush’s generation fades into history, it’s important to remember the lessons he and the others who lived and died learned on Dec. 7, 1941. We had to learn them again on Sept. 11, 2001.
The United States puts itself in great peril when its leaders pay too little attention to actual or likely adversaries, misconstrue their intentions and underestimate their capabilities — whether it involves 20th-century aircraft carriers or 21st-century hackers.
We must always remember that vigilance — not to be confused with hysteria — is part of the price of liberty. We’ll never get back lives we lose through ignorance and complacency.
If we can keep these lessons in mind, those who died on Dec. 7, 1941, like those who died on 9/11, will not have made their sacrifice in vain.