Pearl Harbor, Eighty Years On

For some reason, this last Tuesday—the eightieth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Naval Station Pearl Harbor—was skipped quickly by on most of the media platforms I frequent. But it’s hard to say why, since this was a truly pivotal day in the history both of our country and of the world. More than 2400 Americans died in Hawaii that day. Another 1,178 were wounded. Four U.S. Navy battleships were sunk. Four others were damaged, as were seven other ships. 188 airplanes were destroyed and another 159 damaged. It was, by any rational yardstick, one of the worst days in American history, a day that, as FDR famously said of it, “will live in infamy.” Our nation responded by declaring war on Japan the very next day. (Canada, we should also remember with gratitude, declared war on Japan even before we did, acting quickly on the actual day of the attack.) But others followed quickly: by nightfall on December 8, no fewer than eleven nations also declared war on Japan, including Australia, New Zealand, and China. And so was the battle joined: later that same day the Japanese attacked Shanghai and invaded the Philippines.

For Jews, the day has its own set of memories to offer the remembering public: December 8, 1941, was also the day that the concentration camp at Chełmno opened, a nightmare site at which more than 153,000 Jewish souls, starting with deportees from the Lodz ghetto, were eventually murdered. And it was also the day on which Hitler issued his infamous Nacht-und-Nebel (“Night-and-Fog”) decree, removing all arrested resistance fighters and political opponents of Nazism from the “normal” judicial process, where they might have had some sort of minimal opportunity to defend themselves, and handing the apprehended over to the Gestapo instead, where their fate was a foregone conclusion.

I was raised to think of Pearl Harbor as a day of singular terribleness, as a day of national disaster pretty much without parallel. And, indeed, my father, who was twenty-five years old in 1941, carried the memory of that day to the grave. He never owned a Japanese car, never wore a Seiko wristwatch, never owned a Sony television or radio. Even he thought he was behaving just a bit peculiarly still to be holding onto that grudge all those many years later! But I can also remember clearly him saying to me that whenever he did occasionally think of buying something made in Japan, there immediately barged into his mind images of those poor American sailors—more than a thousand of them—buried forever beneath the wreckage of the U.S.S. Arizona on the floor of the ocean, whereupon he just found something manufactured in the United States (or anywhere but Japan or Germany) to purchase instead. And while I think this policy of my dad’s will probably sound to most today somewhere between quaint and obstinate, I understand where he was coming from and I respected him—and still do respect him—for his allegiance to the memory of our nation’s war dead. Nor, as far as I know, did he ever eat in a Japanese restaurant.

But there is another side to Pearl Harbor, one most of us—and myself most definitely included—prefer to look past or, if possible, to ignore entirely.

By December of 1941, Germany had already occupied most of Europe—including Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Holland, Yugoslavia, and Greece—and either set up puppet regimes in those places to serve their German masters or else seized the reins of governance themselves. The battle for Great Britain was well underway. The United States, strongly allied emotionally with Britain and with most of the nations of occupied Europe, was still grappling with the strong isolationist tendencies at home that had kept American out of the war until the Japanese left even those the most committed to American neutrality with basically no choice but to support the idea of entering the fray. Forgotten by most today are the series of “Neutrality Acts” passed repeatedly by Congress—in 1935, 1936, 1937, and, after the invasion of Poland, 1939—with the express intention of making it illegal for America to become “entangled” in foreign conflicts. Yes, it’s true that these acts were largely repealed after Pearl Harbor, but that is precisely my point: the United States entered the war only after thousands of Americans were killed in the surprise attack in Hawaii and there really was no possibility to respond other than vigorously militarily. Nor, to cite another unpalatable fact, did declaring war on Japan lead directly to our nation declaring war on Germany: it was only after Germany first declared war on us on December 11, 1941, that Congress responded in kind and declared war on Germany as well.

If the Japanese hadn’t drawn the United States into the war and made neutrality impossible, would the U.S. eventually have gone to war anyway? Or would isolationism—and the fear of “entanglement” in foreign wars—have retained its power over the American people and kept us out possibly even after Britain collapsed and became yet another state occupied by Germany? No one can say, of course. But, frankly speaking, if neither the occupation of France nor of Holland moved us to intervene, why would the occupation of Britain necessarily have done so? Are our ties to Britain that much stronger than our ties to France? Or to Poland? Do the Jews who survived the Shoah owe their lives to whoever made the decision to bomb Pearl Harbor and made it impossible for American to stay out of the fighting? You could make just that argument…and cogently too. Needless to say (since we’re dispensing unpalatable facts anyway), there is no evidence at all—and, if anything, evidence to the contrary—that FDR would ever have proposed military intervention to save the Jews of Europe.

It’s also worth remembering that our nation entered the First World War on April 6, 1917, almost three years after the fighting broke out…and that it was only the specter of a German-supported Mexican invasion of American territory with the express aim of restoring Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico to Mexican sovereignty and the reality of an ongoing German submarine offensive aimed at sinking ships headed for East Coast ports—that finally gave President Wilson the political juice necessary to bring America into the conflict. So it would be fair to say we only entered the Great War once we began to fear for ourselves, not to support our allies.

The endless struggle between isolationism and engagement-ism continues to play itself out in the hearts of Americans. If China finally invades Taiwan, claiming that it is merely restoring a renegade island to its traditional place as part of China, will American go to war to preserve the independence of a long-standing ally? If Russia invades Ukraine, which possibility was a front-page story in the New York Times just this last week, will the U.S. go to war (with or without the support of other nations) on behalf of Ukraine? Israel is a tried-and-true ally of the United States. But if war breaks out again in the Middle East and a nuclear Iran threatens to intervene on the side of radical Islamicists seeking to destroy the Jewish State, how will our nation respond?

Although mostly Pearl Harbor Day stirs of feelings of deep sadness in me as I contemplate our losses on that awful day, it also reminds me that our great victories across the world in both the Pacific and European theaters of war were triggered by Pearl Harbor and our subsequent entry into the Second World War. I’d like to think we would eventually have recognized Nazism for the evil that it was and gone to war to eradicate it. But that too is just so much conjecturing…and the reality is that, there too, none can say what might have happened. All we can do is hope! And that too is part of the legacy of Pearl Harbor.