Endings and Beginnings

It was earlier this week that the past returned to the present with a news story about the (re)discovery of the World War II era Japanese Navy submarine I-400 close to a half mile below the surface off the coast of Oahu, the Hawaiian Islands.

Man (and woman) alone of all the beasts of the earth created a calendar, dividing days into seconds, hours and minutes and grouping all of the days into weeks, months and years. Just as you’ve never seen a polar bear with a wristwatch (a bottle of Coke, perhaps, and a smile), you’ll rarely encounter a fellow-traveler not hurrying and scurrying to escape the inescapable.

The timing of the discovery put me in the mind again of discussions and arguments about the presence (or absence) of God (capitalized just in case (s)he does exist-why gratuitously anger the Deity?) and the hours I’ve enjoyed exploring the Clockmaker Theory.

However, I never let the sweep second hand distract me too much from the calendar, especially on a date from a time before my birth when a world as our parents knew it was dying even as the one we were to inherit was being born. And both acts, like so much else connected to our time upon this stage, involve the death and destruction of war.

Today is Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day here in the United States-so insular am I in my rapidly approaching dotage, I have no idea what if any other nation on earth makes of this day but I hope they see it, as do I, as Day One of a Next World Order.

Quite some time ago I had as close to an original thought about it all as I ever have and it nearly died of loneliness so I wrote it down and here it is, again, because I liked it the first time, too.

Everything that had been, not just in the United States, which escaped nearly all of the physical devastation and destruction visited upon every other combatant of the world war, but also around the globe, was swept away and we are still to some degree struggling to sort out what we are and what we are to one another in light of events whose beginnings were long ago.

It was a Sunday morning on the East Coast seventy-two years ago today when the world as we had known it changed, and became the world we know now. On this date, the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor.

Most of the rest of the world was already engaged and engorged in what historians now call World War II as German tanks roared across Europe and through Northern Africa and the Japanese Co-Prosperity Hemisphere spread across Asia.

Shortly after eight in the morning, seventy-two years ago, the USS Arizona, taking a direct hit, sank in nine minutes killing its entire crew of 1,177 Sailors. When the attack on Pearl Harbor ended, eight Navy battleships had been damaged and four had been sunk.

Also sunk or damaged were three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship, and a mine layer. Almost 200 (188 to be exact) U.S. aircraft were destroyed and 2,459 Americans were killed and another 1,282 had been wounded. Some Sailors were trapped in ships which had sunk.

Two days after the attacks, rescuers found thirty-two sailors alive inside the USS Oklahoma, but it was far too late for those aboard her sister-ship, USS West Virginia. Shipyard workers rebuilding the raised battleship afterwards discovered marks on bulkheads below its decks to indicate some Sailors had survived for up to seventeen days after the attack.

All of those stories are part of the larger story of these usually United States of America, which after its own War of Independence, strove and succeeded more often than not in Splendid Isolation in the world community. Our involvement in World War I, while intense and decisive had been brief in comparison to so many other nations. That was to not be the case in World War II.

Seventy-two years ago today, how Americans viewed the world changed. And as a result of the efforts of our grandparents and parents, after World War II, how the world looked at the United States changed as well.

We emerged in its aftermath as a super power and leader of what we called for decades the "Free World." What we are today is all part of a world that came to be as a result of what happened at Pearl Harbor rather than what could have happened as a result of the successful deployment of I-400.

And we learned as if we could forget the price of freedom is eternal vigilance or as Frank Loesser wrote in 1942, "Down went the gunner-a bullet was his fate. Down went the gunner, then the gunner's mate. Up jumped the sky pilot, gave the boys a look and manned the gun as he laid aside The Book, Shouting Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!"
-bill kenny