Seventy-ninth anniversaries of any event rarely merit front-page coverage. Memory fades, survivors and eyewitnesses leave the scene, and new days of remembrance are instated. Cover it again on the big round-number anniversaries — next year perhaps.
So too with today’s 79th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the U.S. into World War II. It is no longer a fixture in the emotional, civic, and political calendar. For decades, into the 1990s, it was rare to pick up a newspaper on December 7 and not see the iconic USS Arizona in flames and sinking on the front page. No longer.
Ironically, about the time December 7 started to slip from active civic memory and observation, Congress introduced it into law as an official day of remembrance in 1994.
Through the first four decades after the event, it was hard to remember a Pearl Harbor Day not begun with thoughts of or lessons from the attack. My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Brantley, told us one December 7th of being a little girl at Pearl and lying under the kitchen table in her home on the hills above the harbor — seeing the faces of Japanese pilots through the windows as they raced by on their bombing runs just a few hundred feet above the home.
We have 9/11 now — a raw and contemporary day of national tragedy to observe. The World War II generation is passing on, and our civic culture, such as it is, focuses on different issues.
Pearl Harbor Day is still worth serious reflection though, and not just to mourn the loss of the 2,403 souls killed that day, or to salute the courage of those who persevered and fought through the attack. In addition, our constant and annual refrain on Pearl Harbor Day should be to remind ourselves that surprise attacks are an endemic feature of national security, and it will continue to happen to the U.S. repeatedly if we do not adopt a posture and set of policies that mitigate these attacks’ worst effects.
For a military historian, the only surprising feature of surprise attacks is that anybody is surprised by their frequency. Almost every major event of World War II before Pearl Harbor was a surprise in some fashion: Consider the Japanese incursion into Manchuria; Hitler’s invasions of Poland, France, the Balkans, and Russia; the British destruction of the Italian Mediterranean fleet at Taranto; and many more.
