This is a re-post from the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941
My parents spoke often of the shock of learning of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on the afternoon of December 7, 1941. It was an event which brought the United States into World War 2 and which defined their entire generation.
Throughout the years I have been privileged to talk with several men who were at Pearl Harbor the morning of the attack. To a man they expressed the same reaction; Initial shock, increasing anger and a desire for revenge, then relief and thankfulness for their own personal survival, followed by the grim realization that a long and bloody war had only just begun.
My father was an FBI agent during the war and spent his time monitoring various points of entry into the US (mostly cargo ports in Philadelphia, Miami, but also the US/Mexico border near El Paso). For him, the war years were tedious and routine, but he saw his work as necessary and important.
My father-in-law, a rancher from a small town in Nebraska, served in the Army Air Corps in the Pacific Theater. He lived his entire post-war life in the shadow of his war experience. He saw things men should never see and had some wonderful stories to tell about his South Pacific adventures. Throughout his life he stayed in touch with the men of his bombardment group (he serviced the B-24s his group flew into combat). His war service defined him.
That generation of citizen soldiers won a brutal and costly war against the forces of fascism and totalitarianism. Many of them were better men than I, and sadly, very few of them remain alive. But in a three hour span eighty-one years ago, their world changed. Many of us grew up in the shadow of that changed world—in freedom, prosperity, and relative peace, in large measure because of what they accomplished.
Let us not forget them, nor their service and sacrifice—even eighty-one years later.
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