Let Lessons Resonate Across Generations
December 7 is a Sunday this year, which may help, because demographics and an overstuffed database have weakened what Abraham Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory.” More and more Americans ask: What’s the big deal about December 7?
Pearl Harbor is not a warmup act for Pearl Jam, but a U.S. Navy base in Hawaii. “Pearl Harbor was asleep in the morning mist,” Commander Itaya, leading the first sortie of bombers, noted in his journal. After the bombs stopped falling, 2,403 Americans were dead, 1,178 wounded, and 149 airplanes and six battleships were destroyed.
The next day, President Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration of war, saying, “On December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”
Whether the date will live in infamy, or at all, depends on history. About 75 percent of Americans have no memory of Pearl Harbor. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, of 16.5 million participants in World War II, fewer than 7 million are alive today.
One obstacle to history lies in an academic vanguard among the 75 million Americans born between 1945 and 1964. In too many history departments, professors of the baby boom generation are, as one older historian puts it, “waiting for veterans to die so revisionism can rule.”
Maybe they were bored with the heroism of their fathers or maybe the war in Vietnam persuaded protesters that America is and was what’s wrong with the world. The demonizers of Harry Truman may move on to proving why Tojo was misunderstood and how Hitler could have been placated.
Stranger theses have infected the American campus.
But the heroes of that war will live forever thanks to Stephen E. Ambrose. His saga of the Europe between D-Day and V-E Day, “Citizen Soldiers,” salutes the privates, sergeants and lieutenants who defeated the Nazis. Every page lists more examples of inspiration, courage, and caring than appear in an entire season of “Seinfeld.”
In the hedgerows of France and the fields of Belgium, GIs learned “to recognize that fear is inevitable but can be managed - and many more things they had been told in training but that can only truly be learned by doing.”
In the least glamorous, most frustrating part of the war, “they also learned that while combat brought out the best in some men, it unleashed the worst in others - and a further lesson, that the distinction between best and worst wasn’t clear.”
History does not always repeat itself but fascination with history is more powerful than ideology. In the 1996 movie “Swingers,” zoot suits and Benny Goodman’s music are more attractive to post-boomers than the anti-American certitude of Vietnam protestors.
Since writing his book, Ambrose taught at the University of Wisconsin, where, he says, “one student said to me ‘I never heard anyone talk positively about war.’ Well, my book doesn’t draw away from the horrors of war at all, but the GIs learned responsibility, the value of teamwork and innovation. They learned how to solve problems right away. Imagine flying a B-17 at 19 or being a lieutenant at 20 and commanding an LST that’s as big as a ship. We don’t give keys to the family car to people that age.
“The students were struck by that and wonder if they could do it, too, but they’ll never know.”
“We cannot escape history,” Lincoln said in 1862, but on future anniversaries of Pearl Harbor, many Americans may forget its lessons. Lincoln believed in history and predicted, in his first inaugural address, its eventual triumph:
“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”