Day of Infamy

[ambitious_wench]

Yes, I'm guilty of regurgitating wholecloth. But sometimes others are much better at saying what needs to be said so that it can be remembered propterly. This the history of this day is slipping from living memory, and will fade entirely by the end of my life.

I recently read that Gen. Elliot Thorpe, a Rhode Island man was military attaché in Dutch-controlled Java (Netherlands Indies) in 1941 when the Dutch broke a Japanese diplomatic code, Thorpe was informed that intercepted messages referred to planned Japanese attacks on Hawaii, the Philippines and Thailand. He immediately cabled the information to Washington, but this warning was ignored.  A week later the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

From The Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1941 that Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor. The attack came after the United States had frozen Japanese assets and declared an embargo on shipments of petroleum and other war materials to Japan. On the morning of December 7, soldiers at Pearl Harbor were learning how to use a new device called radar, and they detected a large number of planes heading toward them. They telephoned an officer to ask him what to do. The officer said they must be American B-17s on their way to the base, and he told the soldiers not to worry about it. A sailor named James Jones, who would go on to write the novel From Here to Eternity (1951), was in the mess hall that morning. Because it was Sunday, there was a bonus ration of milk to go along with breakfast. Jones said, "It was not till the first low-flying fighter came . . . whammering overhead with his [machine guns] going that we ran outside, still clutching our half-pints of milk to keep them from being stolen."

The Japanese planes dropped bombs and torpedoes, and ships started capsizing and sinking. Men jumped and fell from the boats into the water, which was covered with burning oil. Most of the damage occurred in the first thirty minutes. The U.S.S.Oklahoma capsized, and the California, Nevada, and West Virginia sank in shallow water. The U.S.S. Arizona was completely destroyed, killing more than 1,500 soldiers aboard. When Nurses arrived for morning duty they found hundreds of injured men all over the base. The nurses ran around, administering morphine, and to prevent overdoses they wrote the letter M on each treated man's forehead.

There were ultimately 2,390 Americans killed at Pearl Harbor and 1,178 wounded. Two days after the attack, the Navy passed out postcards to the survivors and told them to write to their families, but not to describe what had happened. A man named George Smith said, "My mother didn't get that postcard until February. . . . When the mailman got [my] card at the post office, he closed down and ran all the way to my house . . . woke up my [parents] and told them, 'Your son's OK.' I would not see my mother for two and a half years."

Franklin D. Roosevelt called December 7, "a date which will live in infamy," and he used the event as the grounds for leading the United States into World War II.

Comments

[scascot.livejournal.com]

And now seems like an appropriate time to tell you about a remarkable man, which I had the pleasure of knowing, named Walter Turnipseed. The real Walter Turnipseed, not the character from my stories.

I met Walt in 1998, when my wife worked as a CNA at the Idaho State Veterans Home. Sadly, he has since passed, but I will never forget the story he told me of that day in 1941. Walt was one of the few survivors of the U.S.S. Arizona.

Walt was the son of a local potato farmer, and he worked hard to keep the family farm operating with his father and younger brothers during the Depression. Life wasn't easy, but they were better off than most. But for an Idaho farm boy, his heart was set on the ocean, and distant lands. In 1939, he left the farm to join the Navy, and was eventually stationed aboard the U.S.S. Arizona in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

That day, Walt was returning from the mess hall, when the attack began. Like all the others around him, he stood stupefied for a moment that such a thing was actually happening, and then he ran for his duty station. During the next few minutes, he watched as the bombs rained down, machine gun fire strafed the ship, and torpedoes slice through the water. He watched his shipmates die, and helped to rescue several at great personal risk when the final bomb stuck the Arizona, exploding below decks in the ammo magazine.

He never told me about the postcards.

I asked Walt several times to describe to me the sense of devastation in the days after the attack, and he could not, until September 11, 2001. On that day, he called me at home, and asked if I was watching the news. I said, "Yes", and he said, "Now you know." I cried, that this brave man should see the country he loved attacked so horribly twice within his lifetime. I cried, because now I did know. And I hope that, unlke Walt, I never witness such again.

Walt passed a few days later. I will never forget him. Today, the flag outside my home flies at half-staff, in his memory and the memory of all those who died on that Day of Infamy.

[ambitious-wench.livejournal.com]

Thank you, Rich. I've seem the bullet holes in the buildings there. They left them visible, as a reminder.

E.