Word: pearls
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Long after the Japanese had left, Pearl Harbor reverberated with reports of enemy invasions, parachute landings and other nightmares. Jittery defenders fired wildly at anything that moved. A fishing boat returning with the day's catch was shot to pieces...
...Pearl Harbor seemed an American disaster, it proved a Japanese disaster as well. Churchill knew that when he gloated at the news: "So we had won % after all!" So did Stimson, who felt "relief . . . that a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people." So did Admiral Yamamoto, when he predicted that he would run wild for only a year. Pearl Harbor united Americans in rage and hatred, and thus united, powerful and determined, they would prove invincible...
...Pearl Harbor is peaceful now, blue waves in the winter sunshine, an occasional toot of harbor traffic. A concrete canopy shrouds the rusted wreckage of the Arizona, the remains of more than 1,000 American servicemen entombed inside. Her flag is still raised and lowered every day on the mast emerging out of the quiet water...
...President Franklin D. Roosevelt called "a date which will live in infamy,"* remains a day of death and disgrace, an inglorious event, and the spirit of reconciliation still bows before gusts of rancor. When President Bush, a World War II fighter pilot, indicated that he would attend the Pearl Harbor anniversary ceremonies, White House spokesmen stiffly squelched any talk of Japanese officials' joining in. So did the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. "We did not invite the Japanese 50 years ago, and we don't want them now," says the association's president, Gerald Glaubitz...
...American mythology, Pearl Harbor still represents, even after a half- century, a classic moment of treachery and betrayal. Certainly it was a moment of historic surprise, a moment when the impossible happened, when warfare suddenly spread, for the first and only time in history, to virtually the whole world. This was the moment that changed Americans from a nation of provincial innocents, not only ignorant of the great world but proud of their ignorance, into a nation that would often have to bear the burdens of rescuing that world. The same cataclysm also changed the Japanese from a people trying...