The Date That Lives in Infamy

Today commemorates the 71st anniversary of the surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.  More than 2,400 Americans were killed and more than 1,200 were wounded.  It was the most significant act of terrorism on US soil in the 20th century.  The only other foreign attack on US soil that took more lives was the one that occurred on 9-11, which occurred early in the 21st century.

While I was not even a "gleam" in my father's eye when the Pearl Harbor attack occurred, that event not only - and most significantly - resulted in US entry into the worldwide conflict known as World War II, it also kick-started the chain of events that inspired my father to enlist in the US Navy and marry his Montana sweetheart before setting off to fight his battles in the South Pacific.  That union resulted in my conception.  But I only arrived on the scene when the Battle of Pearl Harbor was a little more than two years old.  War was raging everywhere - from the ultimately lethal steppes of the Soviet Union, to the scorching deserts of North Africa, to the steamy jungles and tropical islands of South Asia and the Pacific Rim, to nearly the whole of the European continent, which would remain absolutely devastated for years afterward.  When I was born, the Allied Forces were still struggling desperately in each of those areas.  That the Allies would ultimately prevail in this conflict was not at all a sure thing.  In fact, the outlook looked quite bleak at that time.

One day after the Pearl Harbor attack, then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress and the US people via radio.  In the first line of his speech that day, he uttered the phrase "a date which will live in infamy" to refer to the events of the previous day.  That phrase has remained one of the most evocative of an era particularly rich in evocative phrases.  Immediately following FDR's speech,

[t]he Senate responded with a unanimous vote in support of war; only Montana pacifist Jeanette Rankin dissented in the House. At 4:00 p.m. that same afternoon, President Roosevelt signed the declaration of war.

Yes, my fellow Montanan Jeannette Rankin - the only woman in Congress - stood alone.   Not even this outrageous act could shake her deep convictions that war was wrong.  She was vilified, threatened and harassed for having those convictions.

But this post is not about Ms Rankin, who remains one of my heroes.  Even if I do not wholly support her on that particular vote, I understand and share her abiding hatred of war.  No, this post instead deals with another remarkable woman of the era, journalist Elizabeth McIntosh, who happened to be covering news in Honolulu in December 1941.  Ms McIntosh wrote a compelling article about what she saw and experienced in the week following the attack.  Her editors "killed" her story, believing that its graphic content would be too "upsetting" for readers and especially upsetting for women, at whom the article was specifically directed.  So the article was never published - until yesterday when it appeared in the Washington Post, 71 years after the event.  Here is a sample of her powerful writing:

      Then, from the neighborhood called Punchbowl, I saw a formation of black planes diving straight into the ocean off Pearl Harbor. The blue sky was punctured with anti-aircraft smoke puffs. Suddenly, there was a sharp whistling sound, almost over my shoulder, and below, down on School Street. I saw a rooftop fly into the air like a pasteboard movie set.     For the first time, I felt that numb terror that all of London has known for months. It is the terror of not being able to do anything but fall on your stomach and hope the bomb won’t land on you. It’s the helplessness and terror of sudden visions of a ripping sensation in your back, shrapnel coursing through your chest, total blackness, maybe death. 

Hers is one of the very few contemporaneous accounts I have read that actually details civilian casualties, describing "charred bodies of children" and bodies lying on slabs in the "grotesque positions" in which they had died, one being that of a little girl in a red sweater and barefoot, who "still clutched a piece of jump-rope in her hand."   Most reporting was about the military casualties, striking enough in its impact.

But military forces are "fair game;" they know what they've signed up for.  Civilians somehow believe that they are exempt.  We simply are not exempt, as was seen not only in World War II war theaters, but in every smaller scale conflict since - whether that conflict occurs between nations or within them.

Ms McIntosh is now a still lively - and incredibly alert - 97 years old.  A short time after her experiences in Hawaii, she joined the newly-created Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of today's Central Intelligence Agency, and worked as a spy throughout the duration of the war.  In that, she was like another of my personal heroes, coincidentally another "Betty."  Ms McIntosh has officially joined my pantheon.