Diamond Anniversary in the Shadow of Diamond Head- a Pearl Harbor Remembrance
Seventy-five years ago today, December 7th, on what was supposed to be a quiet Sunday morning on the island of Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands, the United States was thrust into war by a sudden and deliberate attack by the Japanese Empire. The attack began twelve minutes before 8:00 AM, local time, a full hour before the Japanese diplomatic delegation informed our government that ongoing negotiations- negotiations presumably aimed at the preservation of peace- would come to a cease, and that further discussions between the two nations would come to an abrupt end. In the two hours which followed, 2,471 souls lost their lives including 68 civilians, and an additional 1,213 were wounded- many suffering burns from the fires spawned in the air raid. Nineteen of our ships were sunk or severely damaged that morning, while 250 planes were destroyed or damaged, rendering our Pacific defenses all but powerless to fight back.
The logistics required to launch such an attack, by air and naval forces of the Japanese Empire, made it painfully obvious that plans for the attack had been made many months prior to that Sunday morning, thus revealing the treachery and duplicity of the Japanese government. What also became obvious was the very fact that, despite ominous signs that such an attack might soon take place, our own intelligence assets failed to adequately alert the military and naval command structures stationed on Oahu, in the days and weeks prior to that fateful Sunday morning.
Nestled into a false sense of security that the two mighty oceans which separated the United States from the eastern hemisphere, where two wars in Europe and in Asia were already well under way, the American people were largely united in their steadfast opposition to enter these conflicts, but all of that changed in a matter of hours on that dreadful day. It would be another four years before the largest and deadliest war ever fought would come to an end, a war which saw the death of some eighty-four million people.
Those sailors and soldiers, those airmen and marines, who managed to survive the attack on that Sunday morning, have largely gone on to join those who lost their lives that day. Those relatively few remaining are well into their nineties, and have witnessed first-hand the events which have shaped world history since that Sunday morning, seventy-five years ago. These tortured souls fear that their progeny- those of us who were born in the four generations which have followed, will soon forget the harsh lessons learned in the wake of the attacks on that day, for they know that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.
It is for this reason, above all, that we must remember Pearl Harbor on this day, and always.
-Drew Nickell, 7 December 2016
© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
now available at Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Bending-Your-Ear-Collection-Essays/dp/1633932907?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc
Signed and personalized editions now available at my website:
Follow my postings on the RSS feed: http://www.drewnickell.com/?feed=rss2