'Impossible to Take in Its Significance at Once'

“P.M. Philharmonic concert – In the intermission, news of Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (Hawaii). The Philippines, Hong Kong, etc. – impossible to take in its significance at once.  –"

The painter Charles Burchfield’s reaction in his journal was typical. How was it possible? How to take in such treachery? A Sunday evening, weeks before Christmas. The Philharmonic broadcast from Carnegie Hall that evening featured Arthur Rubinstein performing the Brahms B flat Piano Concerto, Artur Rodzinski conducting. The parenthetical Hawaii suggests the remoteness and unfamiliarity of the naval base. As the Mia Farrow character asks in Woody Allen’s Radio Days: “Who is Pearl Harbor?”

 

Over the years as a newspaper reporter I interviewed three survivors of Pearl Harbor in Ohio and two in upstate New York. More than 2,400 Americans were killed in the attack and another 1,178 wounded. For all five survivors, Pearl Harbor was the event around which they constructed their lives. There was before and after, two discrete worlds. Four spoke reluctantly, often in monosyllables. They needed time and much preliminary conversation before they could speak of the big event. The fifth was angry and seldom stopped talking. I sensed his war stories were well-rehearsed. It was early in the first Clinton administration, and he still hated the Japanese. All five are now dead, and fewer than twenty American survivors of the attack are known to be alive.

 

In his journal the following day, Dec. 8, Burchfield writes: “12:30 – Broadcast of Roosevelt’s call for war Declaration on Japan –”