Today is National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day – and the 82nd Anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Hopefully we'll never forget to pause and reflect on what happened that day, just as we solemnly acknowledge the attack on 9/11/2001 each year.
I've posted the front page of the Lorain Journal of Monday, December 8, 1941 before on this blog. This time, though, I thought it would be interesting to include the day before the attack – to get a snapshot of an unsuspecting nation – as well as several days after, to see the mobilization and jitters of a country suddenly plunged into war.
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I remember as a kid pumping my parents for information about WWII. That and the Great Depression were the defining events of their lives, and I wanted to know how they felt about them.
Dad didn't want to talk about his time in the Army too much. When I asked him if he ever killed an enemy soldier, he said something like, "Well, when you're shooting at an enemy you can't see, it's hard to know." He maintained a pretty tight-lipped silence about his Army life. He was away from Lorain and his loved ones from 1942 to 1945, and he preferred to put it out of his mind, I guess.
Fortunately, Dad came home with a lot of photos – places in France where he'd been and photos of him and his Army pals. Mom was smart enough to make him label them all.
As for Mom, I asked her about what it was like to be a teenager during the War. She said it was kind of scary in the early months, because our victory wasn't a sure thing.
Of course, Admiral Ernest J. King had no doubt about a successful outcome of the War. When asked in August 1942 for a prediction, he stated, "We're going on to victory, of course. We will win this war."
5 comments:
Thanks, Dan - love these old newspapers. These are fascinating.
Dan:
I just read the 2012 entry on your dad.
Mine was an WW 2 MP, too, only in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
He was drafted in '43 at the age of 28, taken aways from a thriving business he had built, stuck with a bunch of "18-year-old idiots" in basic, and despised every, single moment of his service. After V-E, he was stationed in Texas, where your dad was (maybe they knew each other) and learning Japanese but traveling from home to there, after a 30-day leave, when the Japanese surrendered.
"The other GIs took that train apart in celebration."
The only thing he ever really talked about were the kids he saw during his service: two, in particular, Afghan orphans the MPs "adopted." He often wondered whatever became of them after the U.S. left.
He never joined VFW and couldn't understand why anybody would. Never traded war stories with other vets. Never volunteered the information that he had served. He wouldn't allow weapons in the house (toy guns were barely tolerated as long as they were "cowboy guns"), we were forbidden to "play war," and he'd tolerate nothing on the T.V. that glamourized or treated war in a lighthearted way. Hogan's Heroes? No way. PBS special on the war showing dead women and babies and concentration camps? Required viewing.
Between that and the death of my mom's brother in China and the subsequent 2-year fight with the government to retrieve his body, we were raised with an extremely dim view of the armed services, that's for sure.
Big difference between the vets of those years and the vets of today. My father also never liked to talk about his memories of serving until he was dying. Then he shared a few dark memories. I'm not sure why he decided to share them at that time. Maybe he wanted to come clean on a few things before he passed. My younger nephews that served more recently, on the other hand, love to remind everyone that they served. It's awful how arrogant they sound talking about it. They tend to forget that their Grandfather had virtually no contact with any of his loved ones for several years, meanwhile they are serving in Afghanistan with daily showers and texting their friends & family day and night.
I agree with the comment on today's veterans.Just like back in the Vietnam war.Some actually served in Vietnam,like my uncle did.And he will not talk about any of his experiences over there.He drove in a munitions convoy to the front lines and had his truck attacked numerous times and was wounded.But that is pretty much all I have heard about his great service to our country.And then you have the "Vietnam era" vets who were enlisted but they never actually set one toe in Vietnam.They rub real heroes like my uncle the wrong way and go about bragging about how they were "in the war" when they never had a live round come within a thousand miles of their face like my uncle did on a daily basis.Never forget the real vets as they are the ones who give us our freedom.
I hate the way the word hero is so misused to describe any service member coming home from a tour of duty. All too often we see on TV the reunion of family members at the airport welcoming home their heroes. These are not heroes. Thery are service men and women who did their service. Granted they made a sacrifice, but it was their choice. If you want to know what a hero is look up Sgt. Alvin York. He was a hero.
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