Sixty-six years ago today America was signifcantly and forever changed.
The ancient Hawaiians called Pearl Harbor "Wai Momi", which literally translated meant "water of Pearl". On this day in 1941, the Empire of Japan attacked the US Naval installations located there.
I can remember my father, by all accounts an educated and articulate man, reflecting back on that day and trying to capture in words the staggering impact of the attack. His inability to do so told me more than his words could have. He would ultimately serve as a lieutenant in that same Navy.
Pearl changed everything. It (not the policies of FDR's New Deal) ended the Great Depression and dragged America out of her geo-political isolationism. There were 3,581 casualties at Pearl, and hundreds of planes and ships were lost. It could have been much worse, as the US carriers were out on training missions, thereby saving them and their enormous crews from certain destruction. The most devastaing loss was the USS Arizona, whose Memorial is anchored in beautiful simplicty in the center of Wai Momi.
World War Two had been raging for nearly two and a half years that morning of the attack. America had been on the sidelines, offering only material assistance to England through the lend-lease program. But after Pearl, we jumped into the War with both feet and vowed total victory, the only satisfactory measure of which would be the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan. We would wage total war on two global fronts, and in less than four years traveled from a place of defeat an isolationism to complete victory and world prominence.
Japan had enjoyed a series of stunning victories in China, the Phillipines, Singapore and the Malay penninsula, the horrific savagery and barbarism of her conquests rivaling anything the Naziis did. America was led in the Pacific by our greatest soldier - General Douglas MacArthur, whose genius and leadership confounded, bedazzled, and ultimately defeated the Japanese. He accepted the surrender of Japan in the spring of 1945 on-board another battleship named for a State - the USS Missouri.
The road to victory in the Pacific War began in 1942 at the battle of Midway, where the pilots of the USN's Dauntless dive- bombers wrote their names into immortality. Upon locating the Japanese fleet of carriers, they flew into almost certain death to attack and destroy them. Most did die, but not before crippling the Japanese fleet. Thinking back to Pearl Harbor as he watched the Japanese carriers burn, US Airman Wilmer Gallaher exulted into his radio, "Arizona - I remember you".
