Remembering Pearl Harbor, 80 Years Later

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT: Yesterday December 7th, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

BUCK: There we have FDR right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. You’ve all, I’m sure, heard that before. Today is, of course, the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Clay and I both like to weave history into our discussions here — and you know, Clay, it is a reminder I think of, first of all, so many things. I actually just read for the first time recently — I never actually read it — With the Old Breed, which was largely the basis for the series The Pacific, right.

It’s about a Marine who was at a couple of the nastiest battles in the Pacific theater in World War II, and it’s haunting to even read it. It’s one of those things where you look back on the history of America — and there have been a lot of wars, a lot of battles fought. The Marines and the Navy and everyone who served in general, but the Marines in World War II in the Pacific Theater, what they were willing to go right into the teeth of almost defies belief. It really was the Spartans at the pass of Thermopylae outnumbered a hundred to one in terms of just the risk and the unbelievable fearsome adversary they were up against.

CLAY: No doubt, and I think — and you probably have noticed this too. There oftentimes is, I think, in World War II, a bias towards coverage of what happened in Europe because of the clear delineation” The Nazis, Churchill, Hitler, the fact that the East Coast of the United States is so much closer to everything that was going on in Europe, and obviously D-Day was such that the war in the Pacific is in many ways sort of ignored comparatively in terms of the scholarship surrounding World War II.

And interestingly, there’s even able to say of an analogy with this in the Civil War, the war in the West, which obviously wasn’t that far west at the time, but Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia. Everything in the western theater gets a lot less attention than what happened with Lee and Grant and everybody in the eastern theater of the Civil War in such that what happened in Pearl Harbor and the shock of it all gets way more attention that the battles that took place in all of the Pacific theater. Really what you get is a lot of times D-Day and then everybody skips ahead to the atomic bomb and overlooks in many ways what had to take place in the Pacific Theater and how savage that war was with Japan.

BUCK: Unbelievably high casualties taken in conflicts like Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima — numbers that the modern world just wouldn’t be able to handle. The modern, Western societies wouldn’t be able to handle a week of what we were seeing in terms of those figures coming out of some of those battles. And, you know, you mentioned the way that this is covered and historically how kids learn about all this stuff in schools.

I’ll just say this. We all know that the evils of the Nazi regime were something that still almost defies belief, defies possibility. How can anybody be that evil? The Japanese imperial regime was really evil too, and anybody who fought in that theater — anyone who liberated POWs, anyone who was in the Philippines after the Japanese occupation, spent any time in mainland China after the Japanese were through — they allied with the Nazis.

I think this is often forgotten. They were the right hand in the Far East of the Nazi regime, and that was reflected in the way that they fought and the way that they treated POWs, the way that that regime completely dehumanized the enemy, abandoned all rules of warfare, ’cause we also still have this ongoing debate about, oh, dropping the bomb.

What we saw in the various theaters, whether it was Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, there was a willingness to essentially turn these islands into trench warfare battles and fight to the very last man, and that’s why we’re taking such high casualties, ’cause we cleared out — our soldiers, our Marines and the people that were on the front lines were clearing out — yard by yard these volcanic islands, essentially, that are almost like a giant bunker, was the way they’d been constructed. I don’t think there’s really… A lot of people listening to this are big World War II history buffs so they know, but they don’t think kids are learning this stuff. I don’t think they’re understanding the full scope and scale of what happened.

CLAY: I think it’s well said, Buck, and not only that, this is living memory. You probably, Buck, have been fortunate enough as I have to speak to so many different people who fought both in the Pacific Theater and also in Europe.

BUCK: My grandfather was on the USS Bataan. He was there for Leyte Gulf, which was the biggest naval engagement, I believe, in terms of ships involved, in modern history. And he rarely talked about it, but a lot of you listening to this I’m sure know, when you talk to World War II veterans, toward the end — toward the latter four or five years of the end of his life — a few times he would talk about what it was like for five days straight of kamikazes coming and he would just start talking about it out of nowhere.

CLAY: I remember… I told this story a few months ago I think about any great uncle who had met Patton while he was serving in Europe, and Patton was walking down the line and talking to the different soldiers — and they had been out fighting for a long time — and he stopped in front of any great uncle and said, “Have you gotten a chance to kill any Germans yet?” and he said, “No,” and he said, “You will, kid. You will.”

And the point, I think, that is so illuminative and illustrative in so many ways is right now the way American history is being taught — and I was a history major in school, so I understand the concepts of historiography and how we decide to tell the narrative of the past. But we are skipping over the living memory of the Greatest Generation. I believe 30 survivors of Pearl Harbor are scheduled to be at the ceremonies today, and we’re skipping over the Greatest Generation and the legacies that they have left us and are still here illuminating.

Instead, we’re going all the way back to 1619 and trying to argue that America, as founded, as a fundamentally unfair and unjust country and we’re skipping right over your point, Buck, which is we went to war with the Nazis and with their allies in Japan who were determined to effectively destroy freedoms in the world in the living memory of the people who are here with us right now, and we’re trying to pretend that that isn’t the actual legacy of America when it clearly is.

And it’s just so fundamentally a lie that it’s why those generations and people who are closer to them are so patriotic because they understand what America represents. And younger generations are being taught, “Hey, 400 years ago America was a bad place and so you should hate this country today.” It’s a fundamental failure of our country to own our country’s history in an honest and transparent way.

BUCK: There are parents and grandparents — maybe even some listening right now — were there and saw some of this things. But a lot of people listening have parents and grandparents who prevented a global totalitarianism because turning us all into slaves of an authoritarian system. That is the legacy of America within the last hundred years, which is a pretty remarkable thing when you think about it. By the way, it wasn’t just the Nazis and Imperial Japan and their allies.

It was also the Soviet Union, which we worked with in the Second World War kind of because we had to under the circumstances — a whole other conversation to be had about how really twin cousins of the evils of authoritarianism, the Soviet regime and the Nazi regime — socialist evils, by the way. And yet here we are now — to your point, Clay — being told constantly that America is a bad place.

I know we make jokes about how the French would be speaking German if it weren’t for us, but it’s true. It’s also, we’re remembering that, yeah, we can all kid about it now but thanks to some of the dads and granddads of people listening to this program right now and many people all across the country, we actually do live in a free society, and it is worth fighting for.

It’s something to remind ourselves of, right? I mean, whatever day we’re dealing with, Clay — with the craziness of the left these days — we’re not being asked to charge a machine gun nest at Guadalcanal when the chance of getting through that one alive is anybody’s guess.

CLAY: Think about the difference, Buck, between people today who called other they disagree with “Nazis” on social media, as opposed to grandfathers and fathers of many of the people listening right now who had to fight actual Nazis. That’s where we are as a country. We have the legacy to now be able to just yell at people anonymously online who say mean things, or things that may make us unhappy. Those guys had to actually risk their lives fighting legitimate Nazis.