Why, exactly, do we make such a fuss about Pearl Harbor almost 70 years later?
It seems as if every year on Dec. 7, newspapers run stories to remind us it was the Day That Will Live In Infamy (no, strike “seems”—I just Googled the news and there’s a lot of stories). Last year Google neglected to do a Pearl Harbor theme for its web page Dec. 7 and a number of people blasted it for disrespect.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a terrible thing that we lost 3,500 soldiers—but we lost soldiers in WW II at the Battle of the Bulge, we lost them in North Africa, we lost them at Anzio. We don’t commemorate the Civil War and that was the bloodiest we ever had. Why single out Pearl?
It’s true we were the victims of a brilliantly executed sneak attack, but I think we pretty much balanced the score for that. We won the war, utterly defeated Japan and we’ve been allies for decades. Making a big deal of it seems as absurd as demanding we remember the day the British burned the White House in the war of 1812.
Then again, it was one of America’s most traumatic moments in the 20th century. Being attacked on your own soil (as military historian John Keegan pointed out in The Mask of Battle) freaks people out like nothing else, as witness 9/11; the French and German feuding over Alsace-Lorraine; Vietnam’s dogged determination to drive out France and the US and the South still immortalizing the Confederacy. So perhaps when the WW II generation, those who lived through the news, passes on, the urge to remember will too.
Or maybe it’s a Baby Boom thing. The blogger Jeanne d’Arc summed up the “Greatest Generation” theme of the past decade or so as the boomers desperately trying to pay tribute to their aging parents. The emphasis on Pearl Harbor may be part of that.
Possibly it reflects the sense of political paranoia America has lived with for most of the past seventy years. Just as Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policies* are still invoked as a symbol of weakness in the face of evil, Pearl Harbor is invoked to remind us we must always be on our guard, because at any second the enemy could attack us. John Wayne’s anticommunist polemic Big Jim McLain (1952), for instance, makes it clear the House UnAmerican Activities Committee’s investigations into American communism are aimed at stopping the next Pearl Harbor.
If that’s the case, given we seem perpetually terrified of a Red Dawn-style invasion, we probably never will forget.
*I sometimes wonder if one reason for the fixation on Chamberlain is that bringing up America’s willingness to collaborate with the Reich—we traded with them up to and after Pearl Harbor, as detailed in Trading With the Enemy—would be just too embarrassing to mention.
