Saturday, December 16, 2017

Pearl Harbor - The tragedy and the legacy 75 years later


By December 1941 negotiations between the United States and Japan were deadlocked. Japan had allied itself with the Axis powers of Germany and Italy in 1940 and invaded French-held Indochina in 1941. In response, Congress had frozen Japanese assets in the U.S. In exchange for ending those sanctions and withdrawing support for China, the U.S. demanded that Japan leave Indochina. It was not a tenable compromise for Japan; special envoy Saburo Kurusu lamented, “If this is the attitude of the American government, I don’t see how an agreement is possible. Tokyo will throw up its hands at this.”

Negotiations, however, were about to become moot.

At 7:48 a.m. local time on December 7, a low buzzing sound over the horizon grew into a roar, shattering the peace of Pearl City’s sleepy Sunday morning. The first of 353 Imperial Japanese fighter planes, launched in two waves from six aircraft carriers, were about to strafe and bomb naval assets moored at the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor.

By the end of the day, the statistics would be horrific: all eight U.S. Navy battleships were damaged, with four sunk. Three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship, and one minelayer were either damaged or sunk. 188 U.S. aircraft were destroyed; 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,178 others were wounded.

The attack focused on the ships, leaving most of the base infrastructure intact, a fact that underscores the purpose of the attack: to prevent the American Fleet from interfering with Japanese activities in Southeast Asia. “In the east [Hawaii],” said Admiral Yamamoto, “the American fleet will be destroyed. The American lines of operation and supplies [to] the Orient [will] be cut. The enemy forces will be intercepted and annihilated. Victories will be exploited to break the enemy’s will to fight.”

Americans back home were shocked, but no city felt more threatened than San Francisco. Though thousands of miles separated Hawaii from the mainland, many, including the military forces at the Presidio, considered the City’s exposure to the Pacific an open door.

In the hours and days that followed Pearl Harbor, a rash of alleged sightings kept tensions high. The Army's Western Defense Command received a report that a Japanese fleet was 30 miles off the Golden Gate. Every available soldier at the Presidio of San Francisco began digging slit trenches on the bluffs facing the ocean, preparing for a possible landing at Baker Beach.

The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called December 7 the “date which will live in infamy,” and asked Congress for a Declaration of War. That evening enemy planes were reported heading for San Francisco. A blackout was ordered, but it didn’t work; the lights stayed on, even as radio stations and commuter trains went silent. One report circulated that an enemy aircraft carrier had been spotted off the coast with some submarines as well. According to one account, one sub very nearly opened fire on the city with a large caliber gun before the Captain changed his mind. Air raid alarms went of at least 6 times in the first 24 hours; a half dozen mysterious flares fell over the city, dropped “presumably from enemy planes,” the Chronicle said.

The City’s mood became grim; the lights on the Golden Gate were doused, and the entire waterfront was declared off limits to all but military personnel. Within weeks, anyone appearing Japanese was stopped and searched. Though most citizens of California stood by their Japanese American neighbors, public and Government suspicions about Japanese spies living in the U.S. allowed xenophobia to prevail.

Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, allowing regional military commanders to designate “exclusion zones.” This power was used to exclude all people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, including California, most of Oregon, Washington and Arizona. In those states, the only places they were allowed were inside government camps. Many were transferred out of state to one of ten War Relocation Authority relocation centers across seven Midwestern states. The exclusion order effectively incarcerated, without charges or evidence, approximately 130,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans that spring. The Department of Justice also operated eight detention camps where German-Americans and Italian-American were held alongside Japanese Americans.

In the early 1980s, Congress responded to the 20-year-long Redress Movement by issuing a report, ‘Personal Justice Denied,’ condemning the internment as unjust, motivated by racism and xenophobia rather than factual military necessity. The Commission recommended that $20,000 in reparations be paid to those Japanese Americans who had suffered internment. In 1988 President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which provided an additional $20,000 to each detainee.

Though Pearl Harbor Day has been unofficially recognized since the end of WWII, in 1994 Congress designated December 7 Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day to remember and honor those who died. Moreover, it is also a time to celebrate the long friendship Japan and America have enjoyed since the end of the war and take stock of the lessons learned. The official Website observing the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, pearlharbor75thanniversary.com, advocates the study of history as a way of moving forward: “Understanding past events and their consequences can inspire reverence for an emotional commitment to peaceful solutions to conflict. How do we help future generations chart their way toward peace and prosperity? We can learn from the past.”

Every year since 1964, Pearl Harbor survivors and their families have remembered Pearl Harbor by relighting the beacon atop Mt. Diablo. The light was originally erected in 1928 by Standard Oil, but was extinguished in 1941 as part of the general blackout issued by the Western Defense Command. The Sons & Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors this year co-sponsor the 52nd annual relighting with Save Mount Diablo and invite the public to attend the ceremony, which is held at the Concord Campus of Cal State East Bay, where guests can view via live feed the relighting. The beacon will shine all night this one evening in the year.

Pearl Harbor Day Beacon Lighting Ceremony
Wednesday, Dec 7, 2016
3:45 p.m
Oak Room of the Library
Cal State East Bay Concord Campus
4700 Ygnacio Valley Rd, Concord
Free, but parking fee may apply
CSUEB Concord parking (510) 885-3790
Save Mt. Diablo office (925) 947-3535
http://www.savemountdiablo.org/activities_events_beacon.html


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