Pearl Harbor remembered
Today, 65 years after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, my dad can tell you exactly where he was when he heard the news. Visions asked UMR military historian John C. McManus to give us a little perspective on the event as the U.S. remembers:
The morning of Dec. 7, 1941 appeared to be like most other mornings at Pearl Harbor. But under strict secrecy, a Japanese fleet of six aircraft carriers sailed to within 300 miles of the Hawaiian Islands. On that sleepy Sunday morning, they launched their planes.
The first wave of these planes achieve complete surprise. In a matter of seconds, their bombs battered USS Arizona. She rolled over and sank, ending the lives of more than 1,000 sailors and Marines. Elsewhere Japanese planes hit and sank four other American battleships, plus numerous smaller vessels. They also destroyed 164 planes, mostly on the ground. By the time the Japanese onslaught finally subsided, 2,335 Americans were dead and another 1,178 wounded. One little-known aspect of the Pearl Harbor attack is that 68 of the dead were civilians. Most of them were killed by falling shrapnel from American antiaircraft shells.
The attack was stunning to the American people, but it united them as nothing else could. The country burned with war fever and a serious hankering for revenge against Japan.
In the decades since the war, Dec. 7 is always a day of sober remembrance of a tragic moment in time when the world completely changed. Rarely in history has one event so dramatically affected the course of history.
McManus is the author of several books on military history, including The Americans at D-Day and The Americans at Normandy. His latest book, Alamo in the Ardennes, will be released in March.