Strive to preserve sense of infamy in perpetuity

The United States had been walking a tightrope through 1940 and 1941.

The American people were reluctant to join a second world war, but were equally unwilling to cede U.S. interests in the Pacific or abandon the nation’s staunchest ally, Great Britain. So the United States shipped war materiel and humanitarian aid to Europe and China and curtailed oil shipments to Japan.

Taking sides may have made war inevitable, but it was a Japanese sneak attack of the U.S. fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, that inalterably changed the course of history.

The attack on Dec. 7, 1941, was Japan’s declaration of war on the United States. The next day, it took Congress only a half-hour to declare war on Japan by a vote of 82-0 in the Senate and 388-1 in the House.

Within days, Germany and Italy, honoring their mutual defense treaty with Japan, declared war on the United States. The U.S. reciprocated.

The declarations of war were the cold political and legal responses to a brutal attack. But the real story lay in the emotional response across the land. The Mahoning Valley had been sending its young men to the armed services long before Dec. 7, and dozens of families knew their sons were in harm’s way. Today, we live in a world of instant communications. But in December of 1941, it wouldn’t be until Dec. 12 that the first confirmed area fatality would be reported by the War Department. Subsequent official and unofficial casualty reports trickled in for weeks.

While the families most affected were struggling with the reality of their losses or the pain of uncertainty, others reacted. Military recruiting stations were inundated. Labor strikes, including one at the Ravenna Arsenal, were immediately abandoned. Civilian Defense was activated, and within two weeks, 5,000 CD volunteers were enrolled in Mahoning County.

On the 25th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, a Vindicator editorial said that the attack brought unity to the American people and described how “young men left jobs and classrooms and went into the various services by the thousands. Retired men abandoned their lives of ease and women – who stayed in their kitchens more than they do now – went out to take jobs in war industries or replace men in other positions.”

Dwindling generation

Those words were written in 1966 by a member of a now-dwindling generation, those who lived through the horror of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the war that followed. The veterans – both military and civilian – of that conflict are a shadow of their 1940s selves. Fewer than a million of the 16 million men and women who wore the uniform in World War II survive. Vindicator reporter Bill Alcorn interviewed two of those, Robert Bishop, 95, and Adone T. Calderone, 96, for his story in Sunday’s Vindicator and on Vindy.com on Pearl Harbor survivors.

World War II, like the Great Depression that preceded it by a decade, is becoming part of a sterilized history. Fewer and fewer of us have parents or grandparents who can share their stories of pain and loss – and of joy and triumph.

Today is the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Over the next four years, other 75th anniversaries will be marked, leading up to that for VE Day on May 8, 2020, and VJ Day on Sept. 2, 2020.

In an editorial on Dec. 7, 1991, marking the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day, we wrote, “For millions of American fighters – most now in their mid-60s – the war was their most vivid, searing and memorable reality marked by all the bravery, sacrifice, and pain and sorrow that war engenders.”

It is important for the rest of us to do the best that we can to appreciate that bravery, sacrifice and pain.

In less than two hours, a Japanese force that included 353 aircraft killed 2,335 American sailors, soldiers and Marines and destroyed or damaged 19 Navy ships. That attack set in motion events that would change the lives of every American and would reshape the modern world. In preparing his 6-minute address to Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote that Dec. 7, 1941, was “a date that will live in world history.” Before speaking those words, he hand-edited the text to read, “A date which will live in infamy.”

Roosevelt was correct in using either phrase, though more eloquent in the latter. But it now falls to generations who were not alive on that infamous day to preserve its spirit and honor its survivors – not just today, but every chance we get.