Let's Remember Pearl Harbor

During World War II, our morning devotional at Cove School often included singing “Let’s Remember Pearl Harbor.”

Let's REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR
As we go to meet the foe.
Let's REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR
As we did the Alamo.
We will always remember how they died for Liberty.
Let's REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR
And go on to victory."

In part of those war years, heavy tables lined the hall of Cove School, down the center from one end to the other; and when the air raid bell rang, unlike the fire alarm bell when everyone filed orderly outside, we would file out into the hall and get under the tables.

Propaganda was heavy during the war, with posters, buttons, leaflets keeping “anti-Jap” feelings very high, very, very strong;

and those were emotionally formative years for me as a little child of six to nine years old.

Like racial prejudices, feelings of mistrust and hatred die hard and linger for a lifetime. From “South Pacific,”

You've got to be taught

To hate and fear,

You've got to be taught

From year to year,

It's got to be drummed

In your dear little ear

You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid

Of people whose eyes are oddly made,

And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,

You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,

Before you are six or seven or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate,

You've got to be carefully taught!

What was carefully taught in wartime helped keep America’s rage and vengeful determination high, and was part of our drive to victory. But when it’s all over those feelings do not die, and as the world changes, they have to be fought, resisted, stuffed back into the closets of the mind.

They are nevertheless always there.

We remembered, and remember.

In an ethics class as a graduate student at the University of Michigan twenty years later, I remember being outraged at the smug, certitudinous self-righteousness of young students who condemned the way America brought the war on Japan to an abrupt halt, suddenly, almost overnight.

They weren’t there, didn't remember, hadn’t experienced either our years of pain and anger, or our relief, joy, satisfaction, deliciousness of V-J Day.

The enormous and long-lasting cost in Japanese deaths saved the lives of estimated millions of young Americans, British, Australians, and our other Allies, who would have died in Operation Downfall, the invasion of Japan scheduled for October 1945 that was cancelled immediately after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

USS ARIZONA isn't just a memorial, it's still down there. For seventy years this morning, it has entombed over a thousand of us.

Starting a war brings heavy cost and horrendous consequences. Tragically, that’s a lesson we didn’t learn from Pearl Harbor. We need a National Anamnesis, not forgetting.