The Attack On Pearl Harbor And The ‘Collective Amnesia Of Comfortable Societies’

In the mind’s eye, one can imagine a peaceful Sunday morning in Hawaii eighty-one years ago. Warm Pacific trade winds drift across the harbor, passing through the row of warships anchored bow-to-stern. Some crews laze in hammocks below decks while others sleepily emerge topside to perform mundane shipboard tasks.

It is the beginning of another day in the life of sailors who count themselves fortunate to be stationed with the U.S. Pacific Fleet currently at anchor in idyllic Pearl Harbor.

Just before 8:00 a.m., however, the tranquility is broken by the humming drone of radial engines echoing off the escarpments that corral the naval installation. Unsuspecting seamen cast their gazes skyward, trying to make sense of an inexplicable cloud of aircraft bearing down on them. Some fly high and level. Others descend to skim just 50 feet above the water.

As the men stand on the decks and scratch their heads wondering what planes with Japanese rising sun markings are doing here, the first torpedoes splash into the shallow water and propel towards the exposed ships. Then bombs start dropping.

Through the next hour and a half all eight battleships, the pride of the U.S. Navy, are enveloped in fireballs and waterspouts while sailors, many bleeding, broken, and burned, leap into the flaming water.

Meanwhile, farther inland, more Japanese bombers annihilate some 300 American warplanes parked wingtip-to-wingtip on the tarmacs of Hickam and Wheeler fields.

What began as just another dawn in paradise is transformed by two waves of 353 enemy planes into a hellscape. Fires rage and pillars of oily black smoke climb high into the otherwise clear sky. And with each of the 20 vessels hit and set ablaze, sunk, capsized, or run aground, and 2,335 U.S. military personnel and 68 civilians killed, the rest of the 20th Century and beyond is forever changed.

It is difficult for us to comprehend today, a full eight decades later, how truly galvanic the attack on Pearl Harbor was to a United States that just the day before had been fairly divided about the country’s role in the world. Especially considering that beyond our two shores, over each horizon, wars of conquest and annihilation were raging on three continents.

Japan’s rampage of gore had swept through China, capturing the capital of Nanking, murdering over 200,000 innocents. 

In Europe, Hitler’s victorious Wehrmacht lorded over a Third Reich stretching from the English Channel to North Africa to the gates of Moscow. 

Still embittered over the 116,000 young lives lost during America’s last foray into what was then the Great War of 1914-1918, many Americans wanted no part in this new conflagration. Pearl Harbor changed that. By the time President Roosevelt stood before Congress on December 8 to call for a declaration of war against Japan for its “dastardly” attack, the U.S. was united with a singular purpose: To avenge Pearl Harbor and wipe out the Japanese Empire.

Still, not every democratic world leader was so enraged as FDR. 

In London, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was elated. The greatest power of the world, the United States, was now an overt ally. Churchill later recalled that upon hearing the news “I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved.” The Briton intuitively understood that with American industrial might and military potential now fully committed, the war was won.

Four days later, the dual thugs Hitler and Mussolini declared war on the United States, the former above the protests of his generals. 

German military men weren’t the only ones to recognize the true implications of what war with America really meant. Ironically, the man who masterminded the operation, Japanese Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, was feeling as much a sense of foreboding as Churchill was salvation. Having lived in the States for several years, he, too, was well aware of America’s capacity for mass-production. Leading up to the attack, he grimly ascertained his country’s prospects should they be drawn into a protracted war against the United States. “For the first six to twelve months … I will run wild, winning victory after victory. After that time, I have little hope of success.”

Indeed, the U.S. response in the months after Pearl Harbor demonstrated that resilience and adaptability are among our nation’s greatest strengths. 

Consider: of the eight battleships attacked, only three were total losses; Oklahoma and Utah capsized and Arizona exploded. But the others including the sunk California and West Virginia as well as the intentionally beached Nevada, were raised, repaired, and eventually sent back into action. 

Yes, bitter defeats for the Allies at Wake Island, the Philippines, and Singapore lay ahead in early 1942. But almost exactly six months to the day of the attack, Yamamoto’s dire prediction came true at Midway. In one day, American aviators — flying off carriers that luckily had been at sea on December 7 — sent four of Japan’s fleet carriers, along with thousands of

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