I Remember Pearl Harbor

By: Teddy
Published On: 12/9/2006 2:18:58 PM

It was a typically chilly upstate New York December day, we had finished Sunday after-Church brunch and I, just a couple of weeks short of my eleventh birthday, was, as usual, doing two things at once: putting together a jigsaw puzzle and setting type to print my family newsletter on my little hand-powered rotary printing press, when the phone rang. Our English friends a few blocks away were phoning to say "Turn on the radio! The Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor."
It was true, but no surprise to my family, because my father, a Reserve Army Officer had been called to active duty the year before in 1940 as President Roosevelt began mobilizing and had already sent 50 "over-age" destroyers on Lend Lease to Britain... and even though we had two Japanese diplomats in Washington at that precise time, supposedly negotiating our disagreements with the Empire of Japan. My Mother had been knitting scarves and socks for Bundles for Britain for two years, and we already had refugee children from London in our Church community.

We also had replaced a painting on the living room wall with a large map of Europe, and my father had outlined the then-extent of Nazi aggression: gobbled up were Austria, Sudetenland, Danzig, then half of Poland (with the other half going to Stalin along with the Baltic States), southern Denmark, the Lowlands, northern France; the British had evacuated from Dunkirk in a rout, and the air Battle of Britain had begun at the same time the Italians were in Ethiopia, the Japanese were in Manchuria and the Chinese Nationalists were in a long retreat to Chunking. 

We hear much nowadays about "the good war," and how the entire country pulled together overnight, and much of that is true. We were still suffering from the Great Depression, we had very little military equipment (some units drilled with broomsticks, lacking weapons), we were stunned out of our apathy and our assumption heretofore that we were a safe distance from overseas wars. We were unprepared, scared, and angry.

Forgot sometimes is that FDR was a leader who was disiked by at least 30-40% of the population, even though re-elected by a landslide. We had a small but vocal Communist Party which supported the Soviets against the Allied Powers (England and France), there was a very strong isolationist element in our body politic evidenced by a militant America First outfit which today we would call a pressure group agitating against being dragged into another overseas war in which we had no vital interest they could see, a pro-German group called The German American Bund, and a pro-lynch racist KKK left over from the no-so-long-past Civil War.  A year before, visiting my Southern grandparents in Charleston, I had watched a cross burned in the park across from our hotel while demagogues orated, and men in white sheets roared approval, sounding just like the Nazi crowds roaring approval of Hitler in the sepia-colored Saturday matinee newreels at the movie theater. 

Then, we went to war, ration books appeared overnight (red points for meat, so much per week, sugar was rationed, chocolate and Lucky Strike green on the cigarette package went to war), gasoline was rationed (an "A" card was worth 5 gallons a week), we saved tin cans and paper, bought War bonds while small denomination war savings stamps were sold in school to children, we put up blackout curtains, and followed my father around the country as the 1st Infantry Division trained and brought itself to full effectiveness.

President Roosevelt addressed Congress a full day after Pearl Harbor, we heard his address on the radio, requesting that Congress declare War on Japan and the other so-called Axis Powers of Italy, Nazi Germany, Hungary, etc, as they had all declared War on the United States immediately after Pearl Harbor.  As I re-call, only Mrs. Rankin, Representative from Mississippi, voted against the formal declaration of war.

When I compare those times with these, with how our leadership responded, the peculiar presidential direction to "go shopping or the terorists win," the lack even of rationing or any requirement for sacrifice by the general population, the failure of the children of the leadership elite to participate to any degree in the blood and sacrifice of the so-called War on Terrorism... Well, it is to weep. 

 

Comments



Loved this diary (Catzmaw - 12/9/2006 4:00:42 PM)
I'm not old enough to remember WWII, was born in the 50s, but have always been fascinated by the war.  My high school years were spent reading everything I could find about it, and to this day it holds an inexplicable attraction. 

Agree also that the sacrifices for this war are being made by a small cadre of families.  It's shameful.



Knitting socks for an infantryman (Teddy - 12/9/2006 4:02:30 PM)
When The War became our war, my mother converted from Bundles for Britain to knitting socks for my father who, as an infantryman, walked to work across North Africa, Sicily, Omaha Beach, and Western Europe, meaning he went through literally hundreds of nice, ribbed wool socks with neatly turned heels, and then again across Korea a few years later. I never saw my mother without that triangle of short, double-ended steel needles in her hands, and a ball of light khaki yarn, clicking, clicking away, literally sometimes with her eyes closed and a asleep in  her chair. Funny, the things that stick in your mind. 


Thanks, Teddy (Kathy Gerber - 12/9/2006 4:35:28 PM)
Tell us more if it comes to mind.  Love this -


My Uncle Was With Patton (Catzmaw - 12/9/2006 9:06:55 PM)
from North Africa, to Italy, to Normandy, to Belgium, to the Battle of the Bulge.  In the great military tradition of my family (not!) he once surrendered to a German Shepherd (for pride's sake let's call it an Alsatian, shall we), while standing guard at night during a brief stop in Patton's rush to save the Battling Bastards of Bastogne.  My poor rear-echelon typist (according to his war records a stunning 8 words a minute) uncle was knocked down by the big friendly dog from behind started yelling that he surrendered. 

I asked what his job was during this great rescue mission, and he replied that he and the other typists and go-fors from HQ would be sent out in a half-track to find the enemy.  Supposedly, if they didn't come back that meant the enemy was ahead.  He did say that he and his comrades once encountered a large group of demoralized Germans.  Both sides threw their hands in the air and surrendered at the same time.  After some consultation it was decided that the Germans would be the prisoners and the Americans would be the triumphant captors.  Cigarettes were passed around and sealed the deal. 

Nobody ever knitted my uncle any socks, but he did get a lot of morbid poetry and gravestone tracings from his very eccentric older sister.  She was once thrilled to find the lyrics to the bluegrass oddity "Your Mother's In the Baggage Car Up Ahead" (a young soldier going home on leave is unaware that his mother tried to visit him and died and thus came to be in the baggage car) and sent them to him.  She did the same thing to my father, a signalman stuck on a tiny outlying Hawaiian island all alone for weeks at a time a year before Pearl Harbor. 

My uncle's been dead almost 21 years, but I remember his stories very well.  He was badly affected by the war -- a gentle soul who'd struggled with and overcome alcoholism by the time I was growing up -- but the memories of the bad things he'd seen lingered with him always.  He told hilarious stories, but there was deep within him that sense of sadness. 



Born (Gordie - 12/10/2006 1:58:17 AM)
in 36, I do not remmeber much of the early start of the war. Remember my 2 uncles being over there. 1 was a medic and the other in the infantry.
I can remember stories that the reason FDR was disliked was something to do with banking. Seems a lot of banks were closed and he started a program to get them open. The finance community was all bent out of shape. Seems they still hate Democrats because they can govern and get the economy back on its feet.


Franklin (seveneasypeaces - 12/10/2006 3:51:19 AM)
FDR was a traitor to his class.  Seems they never expected him to care about those less fortunate.  The international bankers (federal reserve) have created every war and every inflation, depression and assassination. 

The powers made term limits after FDR since the efforts to impeach him didn't work.

http://www.themoneym...



Labor Troubles (Teddy - 12/11/2006 12:09:22 PM)
It's long gone now, but the Great Depression was a time of world wide labor troubles and extraordinarily high unemployment (I remember hoboes riding the rails would come to our back door seeking food during our summers at our lake cottage--- they were mostly unemployed and desperate workers).  We had lockouts by management and sit-ins by workers trying to organize (the newly formed CIO was instrumental in a lot of this) and violence in the factory yards, all heavily reported on the radio and discussed at our dinner table, with the Communists actively fomenting trouble.

In the middle of the War, John L. Lewis organized the coal miners and actually struck for better mine safety and higher wages, generating enormous hostility toward the labor movement by more people than just Republicans.  On the other hand, Harry Bridges, otherwise a radical, organized his stevedores on the docks and, at the beginning of the Cold War often halted shipments to Soviet Russia because he opposed Stalin and realized that Communism as practiced in Russia did not benefit the working class (contrary to all the propaganda).



The Labor Troubles (Catzmaw - 12/11/2006 1:09:56 PM)
also enraged many in the military.  I remember reading accounts of marines on Iwo Jima speaking angrily to the interviewer of the strikes back home.  Many of the soldiers out in the field saw the strikes as an effort by miners and factory workers to enrich themselves while the military its  all to the war effort.  I'm sure this view was helped along by the business interests who were benefitting mightily by the war economy and the cheap wages for their workers.  Wherever there is war there are war profiteers.


I forget to mention (Teddy - 12/12/2006 12:22:54 PM)
the shock and disgust most Americans felt at the attack on Pearl--- weren't the duplicitous Japanese actually in Washington, supposedly negotiating on a diplomatic mission to avoid war, thus lulling us into carelessness while stabbing us in the back--- obviously the Japanese aircraft carriers did not materialize out of nowhere on December 7th, they had to have been underway and steaming across the Pacific for some time prior to launch, so those lying Japs (Nomura was the name of one, as I crecall) were deceitful and dishonest.

I was only 11 at the time, and even then, working my jigsaw puzzle, I thought "Well, how else could the Japs attack us successfully?" How else could some one attack us but by using surprise, by using duplicity, by distracting our attention elsewhere?  Seems good tactics to me today, as well.

Today, in a time of pre-emptive attacks based on Cheney's one percent doctrine--- how naive we were in 1941.