My grandmother showed me a scrapbook last night, one assembled by her father during the early days of America's involvement in World War II. It begins the day after Pearl Harbor, and continues to Dec. 23, 1941. I couldn't put it down, fascinated both as a journalist and as an American living during wartime.
Historically, of course, this is a gem, for several reasons. It gives an interesting picture of how the attack was dealt with in the newspapers, and roughly where people's heads were at. Along with the main headlines describing the attack and its immediate military meanings, the scrapbook is peppered with smaller headlines and two- or three-paragraph stories: "Isolation Sentiment Fades in Capital" "Soldiers Urged to Learn Flying", "Pacific Coast Girds For War", "736 Japanese Nationals Arrested Throughout U.S." etc.
There's a story about a Honolulu lawyer, Roy A. Vitousek, who was flying his private airplane (how rich did you have to be to have your own airplane in 1941?) when the Japanese first approached Pearl Harbor:
"Flying closer to inspect the strange craft, Vitousek was greeted with a burst of machine gun fire. He dived for the ground and landed with many bullet holes in his plane."
Lacking a scanner right now, I can't show you folks the faded photographs of the first victims of the attack, or of roadblocks set up in Oakland to guard the airport. There is a particularly haunting AP photo of a man looking over his shoulder at a roaring fire, holding a long stick. The caption: "A member of the staff of the Japanese Embassy in Washington is shown burning official papers on the embassy lawn a few minutes after first reports of the Japanese attack on the Pacific Islands. Similar scenes occurred at various Japanese consulates."
This man can't have known about the attack beforehand. Did he suspect it was coming? What was he thinking? Was he afraid? Proud?
Another striking aspect of these old clippings is just how detailed they are. An infograph compares the naval strength of both nations in the Pacific, detailing how many battleships, carriers, submarines, cruisers and submarines each nation possessed. This kind of detail would likely be considered treasonous if it were printed today.
Of course, what struck me most were the parallels between the beginning of WWII and the first weeks following Sept. 11, 2001.
The levels of alert, to be announced by the Tribune siren and on the radio, were color-coded for some strange reason. How do you color-code a siren?
"This is the way radio warnings are relayed by the Alameda County Council of Defense:
White: All Clear
Yellow: Precautionary
Blue: Precautionary - planes approaching nearer.
Red: Enemy is here in seven minutes"
Yes, I see. How useful.
Of course, Congress gave almost unanimous support for war in both cases. In both cases, the sole dissenting voice was that of a woman in the House of Representatives. In our time, it was Democrat Barbara Lee of Oakland, Ca. In 1941, it was Republican Jeanette Rankin of Montana (who had also voted against a war declaration in 1917).
There are also parallels in the Commander in Chiefs' explanations of the conflicts ahead. In some cases, it's downright eerie.
Headline: 'Roosevelt's Talk
Deck: President Predicts Long, Hard War and Calls For Increased Sacrifices'
FDR: "There is no such thing as impregnable defense against powerful aggressors who sneak up in the dark and strike without warning. We have learned that our ocean-girt hemisphere is not immunes from attack - that we cannot measure our safety in terms of miles on any map, any more."
But somehow, FDR comes across as being somewhat more sincere. Perhaps he had better speechwriters. Perhaps the threat in 1941 was, well, more real. But I don't take comfort when Bush tells us not to worry, because our military has it under control. Don't worry, Iraq will be a pushover. Of course, he's also imploring us to shit our pants with fear at both angry cave-dwelling fundamentalist bloggers and at the idea of maybe eating smaller portions and riding our bikes instead of stuffing our faces with the hormone-bloated meat of factory mutants from the comfort of our Ford Instigator.
Anyhow, don't you wish Bush had stood on the rubble of Ground Zero and said something like this?:
"We are now in this war. We are all in it all the way. Every single man, woman and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking in our American history. We must share together the bad news and the good news, the defeats and the victories - the changing fortunes of war."
If FDR had been sitting in his wheelchair atop the still smoking ruins of the Twin Towers, he might have said these things, just as he did Dec. 8, 1941. He might also have announced that taxes would have to be levied, to pay for this monumental effort. And you know what? I'd be OK with that. A tax, to pay for a necessary war. If it's that vital, if it's a matter of survival, well gee, OK. If our boys are over there fighting and dying, if it's that important, OK, I can make this sacrifice. I'd consider it an investment in the dividends of lasting peace.
Can I get a witness?
But no. This...thing we're doing in Iraq, which, like every other war in history is a war over land and natural resources, is sold to us as something we can do from the comfort of our homes. A tax would only draw our attention en masse to the war; it would solidify that a sacrifice is being made for the common good. But the common good is a concept that the spoiled princes currently in power would like to erase from our memories, like a bad dream.
They're betting that the thing we want most is not to be bothered; that we want our air conditioning and our instant communication and Hot Pockets and iPods to drown out the sounds of misery and desperation and hunger around us. That for the New America, freedom is a word for convenience; the freedom to choose between two identically corrupt white aristocrats to rule over us; the freedom to choose Large or Extra-Large everything; the freedom to choose between slavery and starvation; the freedom to exploit or be exploited.
They are betting that it's not worth it to us to march on Washington, all of us, carrying pitchforks and torches and demanding the Beasts' heads on sticks. We have too much to lose, after all. Perhaps they are right. And by the time we don't have too much to lose, it will be too late. Not just for us, but for several billion people who have put up with more bullshit than us, and who will be, most likely, quite unsympathetic to our plight. The oil will be gone. The water will be concentrated in a few hands. The air won't be of much use to anyone. Damn it all, don't eat us. We're AMERICANS.
One last thing before I go to bed, one last little snippet from Great-Grandpa Vernon's World War II scrapbook. You may think of it as an eyewitness account of heroism of the highest order. You may dismiss it as particularly ghoulish propaganda. It is an excerpt from an interview with a Navy chaplain who survived Pearl Harbor, printed in the Oakland Tribune, Dec. 8 or 9 1941:
Headline: 'They died Gloriously' Says Chaplain in Vivid Description of Attack on Hawaii
" I was in the thickest of the attack," said Chaplain MacGuire. "Our 130,000,000 Americans would glow if they could have seen how our boys died. It was glorious. Nay a whimper! They manned their guns until the decks buckled with the heat."
The chaplain wiped his blue eyes.
"Ah, how game," he said. " At the Marine barracks where the wounded lay that Sunday, if a worse wounded man was brought in, a man with a leg missing or an arm missing would say 'for God's sake I'm all right, put him here on the table. Take me out of here.'
"And while this business was going onthose Japs were still machine-gunning - do you get the picture I'm telling you lad? Badly burned men without clothes carrying blankets begged me, 'I want to get back to my ship. I want to get back to my gun.'"