On a quiet Sunday morning, sixty-eight years ago today, when Japanese military planes flew low over the mountain peaks of Oahu, Hawaii headed for the U.S. Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor, they would precipitate a conflict that would end only after President Truman made his fated decision to drop nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
That conflict is but a faint memory in the minds of many Americans, and today’s activities will probably be taken up more with shopping for the holidays than it will be memorializing the conflicts of World War II which, among other tragedies, brought us the Holocaust.
My brothers Roland, Roger and Harvey served in that war, and our family was extraordinarily lucky that they came back home to our cottage on a street where other homes displayed in their windows the gold stars representing fallen men and women.
Together, my brothers covered a wartime territory from Alaska to the Panama Canal Zone; from England to the European continent; and in the Philippines where Roland might have been part of a multi-point force of hundreds of thousands of troops prepared for a massive invasion of the Japanese homeland – an event which became moot after Truman’s decision.
Decades later, Roland would argue for NOT heading into a land war in Iraq. Perhaps he surmised that there would be no political will for the kind of total, overwhelming and unconditional victory which was the only result that America would accept following the six-year conflict brought on by the attack of December 7, 1941.
I miss you, my brothers. Jo-Jo wishes that you were still here for our crazy family get-togethers, especially those we had on New Year’s Day and all of the others on your farms.
Photo by Bergeron: It features a partial view of the Atlantic Theatre section of the WWII Memorial which is located at the end of the Reflecting Pool, opposite from the Lincoln Memorial.
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