Summary: 71 years on, the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor is rapidly passing out of living memory as roughly 1000 members the “Greatest Generation” pass into eternity every day and as the cohort of living Pearl Harbor survivors shrinks the vanishing point. As that cohort shrinks, we lose contact with living memory of those events that wrenched America out of neutrality and into the Second World War. Today, should we see or encounter a Pearl Harbor survivor or survivors in our pleasant Desert, we should take a moment to reflect and remember that day of infamy on which more than 2000 Americans laid what Abraham Lincoln once called “so costly a sacrifice on the altar of freedom.”
By: Paul S. Marchand
Today’s online Desert Sun contained an article by Denise Goolsby headlined “Pearl Harbor survivors in valley dwindling.” Reading it, I was reminded yet again of how the so-called Greatest Generation has been passing into eternity at the rate of more than 1000 a day. Soon, World War II and the attack against Pearl Harbor 71 years ago will have passed from living memory; it will be only a period piece. There is always something melancholy about a cusp period, about time when some great and terrible event passes out of living memory and into the realm of the historian.
As a late-Boomer child, born in the early 60s, I belong to one of the last age cohorts to grow up in communities in which World War II veterans were an active, substantial, and integral part of life. In my neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills were numerous residents --- some of them still in their vigorous late 40s or early 50s --- for whom World War II service was a first-hand, personal experience. Because Los Angeles was, and still is, the quintessential entertainment industry “company town,” drawing workers and talent from a worldwide pool, some of those World War II veterans in my neighborhood actually had seen service with the Wehrmacht or with the Armed Forces of Italy and Japan. But most of them were part of America’s own “Greatest Generation.”
Yet as the cohort of World War II veterans in general and Pearl Harbor survivors in particular grows ever smaller, now becomes an increasingly opportune time to reflect on the conflict and the cause, and the service and the sacrifice of those then-young men on that Sunday morning in Hawai’i when war came thundering down upon them.
Few, if any, of the young men on duty at Pearl Harbor on that dreadful day expected an attack. Sunday, December 7, 1941 started like any other peacetime day in what was one of the most desirable duty posts in the United States Navy. Yet, for Americans, notwithstanding the existence of a war that had been underway in Europe for more than two years, the idea that the United States would find herself essentially dragooned into the war as a belligerent seemed far-fetched to much of the American public. Nonetheless, Pearl Harbor was Where It All Began.
Not surprisingly, for Boomers and our successors -- for whom World War II was the stuff of vicarious hearsay -- talking to actual veterans of the Pearl Harbor attack always carried a kind of particular fascination. Few things carry the kind of immediacy and power that a first-hand recounting of the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor carries. Oh, to be sure, those of us with some degree of book learning about the history of the Pacific War may entertain a broader perspective, and may be able to discourse learnedly on the more Olympian aspects of high-level policy and strategy, but none of us will ever be able to summon from first-hand memory the sights, the sounds, the smells, the pressure wave from the explosion of the magazines in Turret II aboard the battleship Arizona (BB-39), or the badly damaged USS Nevada (BB-36) attempting to sortie, struggling to gain maneuvering room at sea, making her agonizing way down the channel in Pearl Harbor before grounding herself at Hospital Point.
Such eyewitness, percipient testimony to such history making events is something we cleave to ever more tightly as the number of witnesses to those events diminishes every year. And so, if when out and about in our pleasant Desert, one should come across a vehicle driven by an elderly man and carrying a “Pearl Harbor Survivor” license plate, take a moment to remember, before all living memory of Pearl Harbor passes away. For if memory is the custodian of all our horrors, memory is also the strongbox in which we preserve our inspirations, and also the treasure chest in which we cherish our precious recollections of service and costly sacrifice laid on the altar of freedom.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California, where he spent two terms on the city Council. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, his late father, then eight years of age, was munching pizza and drinking illegal beer in Patsy’s Bar in the Bronx. His mom, then a toddler in El Paso, Texas, remembers the sun-rivaling flash of light, visible in El Paso, from the first atomic test, code-named Trinity, outside Alamogordo New Mexico in July, 1945.
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