A friend of mine was in Honolulu December 7, 1941. Recently, she wrote about that day and the days that followed for a writing group where she lives. She lived in Nuuanu, so the attack was not apparent to her until her Mom found out by accident that Pearl Harbor was being bombed. My friend wrote about the dislocating effects of the war on her family, their move, the loss of her father’s business that had depended upon tourism, and so on.
I live in a house from which I see Pearl Harbor every day. When I visited the Arizona Memorial, I learned that a spotter plane for the Japanese was circling somewhere not far from where my house is located. I have wondered what it was like for that pilot, watching his countrymen rain bombs and torpedoes down on unsuspecting men and women, knowing that lots of people who were anticipating a quiet Sunday morning, were being killed with his assistance.
My friend wrote about the rumors that swept across Oahu that Sunday—the reservoirs were being poisoned, the Japanese Army was landing on the shoreline—and how fear dominated the citizenry until more facts emerged.
It would have been unimaginable that December day that, years after the attack, at Pearl Harbor, pilots from Japan who had participated in the bombing would embrace American service personnel on whom those bombs had been dropped.
In my line of vision from my window, beyond Pearl Harbor, stands a pu’u called Punchbowl. Inside its volcanic crater is the military cemetery that is the final resting place of many of the people killed at Pearl Harbor. Their graves lie mingled with the graves of other men and women who, whether or not killed in battle, gave some of their time living on earth as members of U.S. armed forces.
We set aside a day each year to remember those people. Coincident with that date, there is a lovely and moving tradition in Honolulu, carried out at water’s edge. Floating lanterns are launched, each to remember someone who has died—relative, friend, ancestor, whomever. As a people, we are good at setting aside days and at preserving moving traditions.
Pearl Harbor and Punchbowl are in my line of sight every day.
“War is politics by other means.” So said Clausewitz. I think war is a failure of politics by which I mean the spirited exchange of ideas in the process of hammering out policies to govern the polity. And so Pearl Harbor and Punchbowl can elicit a twinge of sadness that, as humans, we have failed at politics so much. For at least 30 of my seventy years, the U.S. has deployed soldiers and sailors to fight a war, declared or not.
The optimist in me points out that, for 58% of my life, we have not been adding people killed in action to our cemeteries.
The historian in me reflects back on the overseas wars in which the U.S. has been engaged since 1900. World War One stands out as a series of miscalculations by European governments. There is some evidence that British commercial interests maneuvered for twenty years to get the British government to fight Germany. The issue was Germany’s growing colonial interests and commercial power.
Whatever the roots, it was the British government, through its alliances with continental powers, France and Russia, that jumped at the chance to go to war with Germany. Haven’t we all seen depictions of the British as they went off to war in 1914 declaring that they would be home by Christmas, so confident they were of their military prowess and political rightness?
Three years and hundreds of thousands of dead later, the U.S. got involved to protect the rights for its ships to traverse the Atlantic without being sunk.
There is a strong academic argument that World War Two was chapter two of World War One and that the issues causing powers to fight in 1914 lingered through the Vietnam War as well. If that argument is true, a lot of people have died as a result of the machinations of British economic interests in the 1890s.
Those specific interests did not prompt Japan to attack Pearl Harbor or the Iraqis to invade Kuwait. The governments of those countries made decisions to go to war for purposes defined by the governments.
And therein lies the genesis of most wars. People of a Certain Age, can we recall a time that the people of any nation coerced its government to go to war?
I do not intend an anti-government screed. There is a significant list of ways in which my life directly benefits from the governments under which I live at the national, state, and local levels. I take seriously that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and wish that were true for all people.
Sadly, there are too many places where the consent of the governed does not mean much. There are too many places like Punchbowl where real people are buried, men and women who chose to serve their country in wars they did not want but fought as a matter of duty.
Punchbowl is not far away from Nuuanu, where my friend was living in 1941. She has reminded me that war has many costs beyond the lives of our military, costs worth remembering on every memorial day.
Daniel E. White
May 28, 2017