Then came the electrifying radio dispatches and word-of-mouth reports that the Japs, as they were called, had bombed Pearl Harbor. Overnight, isolationists became converts to intervention, stirred in part by the eloquent call to service from Franklin Roosevelt and in part by the great tidal wave of gung-ho patriotism that swept across the land. Pearl Harbor had enraged and unified a country, committing the United States to a common goal.
Pearl Harbor was a rite of passage for those I have called the “greatest generation.” Great, but not perfect.
Some Americans dodged the draft, or pulled strings to get cushy assignments. Black Americans in uniform had to fight to get into combat; most of them were assigned as hospital orderlies or as kitchen stewards. In the business world, war profiteers cashed in. But by and large America responded magnificently to its greatest challenge since the Civil War.
The Japanese who had thought their attack would eventually force the United States to sue for peace had monumentally miscalculated. Within months the United States had been converted from a peaceful, almost pacifist, nation into a warrior state whose national purpose was to fight the Japanese and the Germans to an unconditional surrender. Everyone understood the terms and, to a remarkable degree, almost everyone participated in the war effort.
Marriage plans were accelerated; brothers and buddies rushed to enlist in the same service; college kids arranged to graduate early. So many members of that generation have said the same thing to me: the day they heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor they knew their world had changed. They just didn’t realize how much.
Young men and women traded in their days of innocence for years of separation, sacrifice and loss. In the early going, when the daily news was bleak and the outcome was uncertain, the small chorus of critics grew bolder. But the American will held firm, fortified by the carefully screened news reports from the front and the relentlessly upbeat tone of the commander in chief.
Would we have stayed the course had there been television cameras on those murderous beaches in Normandy or on Iwo Jima, had the American public known the full details of how the invasion of Italy had bogged down? No one can know for sure. But in the era of modern communications it will always be a provocative “what if” proposition. During the Vietnam War, President Lyndon B. Johnson was determined that America could have both guns and butter–marshaling the resources to fight a far-off war while requiring no sacrifices of the civilian society. It was not only a dubious economic proposition; it added to the national schizophrenia about America’s role in the war. There was no common material sacrifice at home as there was during World War II, when families rationed gasoline, meat, sugar and, yes, butter.
Not everyone was happy about the restrictions, and there were more than a few episodes of hoarding. But the rationing system was a constant reminder that greater sacrifices were being made elsewhere. There were other reminders. Picture a neighborhood of modest family homes, many of which had gold stars hanging in the front window. Those were the homes of mothers who had lost a son in the war.
I like to think that America would have gotten involved in the war without the attack on Pearl Harbor. The threat to our own security and all we believe in was simply too great to ignore forever, despite the reservations of those who believed we could be a self-contained fortress. The despicable behavior of the Japanese that one Sunday morning in 1941 ended the argument and forged a new American generation that, in my judgment, will always have a place in bold print in the history of the world.
