Pearl Harbour — 75 years on…

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from The Washington Post....

After Pearl Harbor, this mail plane had a new mission: Find the attackers

Crew members of the unarmed aircraft — which now sits in the restoration hangar of the Smithsonian National
Air and Space Museum in Virginia — were issued World War I-era rifles and ordered to find the Japanese fleet.

By MICHAEL E. RUANE | 6:00AM EST - Friday, December 02, 2016


A Sikorsky JRS-1 flying boat sits in the restoration hangar of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Virginia. The mail plane
was sent out in search of the Japanese fleet after the Pearl Harbor attack. Its only armament: three old rifles, which the crew would have had to
fire through the windows. — Photograph: Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post.

THE tattered Pearl Harbor survivor looks every bit of 78, with weathered skin, rusty bones and the faded “U.S. Navy” emblem the old bird got before the war.

Gray from age and years in the service, the veteran of December 7th sits with other World War II antiques, weary and in need of attention.

But with the 75th anniversary of the 1941 attack this week, and commemorations scheduled in Hawaii and around the country, this survivor, like most who were there that day, has a story.

The ungainly Navy airplane at the National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, is one of the few original U.S. aircraft in existence that flew against the Japanese armada that day.

Then painted silver and orange-yellow, with a bright green tail and red trim, it was an unlikely combatant.

Designed as a small airliner — a “baby clipper” — it was unarmed and part of a unit called Utility Squadron One, which hauled mail, sailors and Navy photographers around the Hawaiian Islands.

It had window curtains and a restroom with porcelain fixtures. Its top speed was just over 100 mph.

With Pearl Harbor a scene of death and devastation that Sunday morning, Plane No.1063 — its insignia a pelican carrying a mailbag — was ordered to seek out the enemy.

For armament, the 28-year-old pilot, Ensign Wesley Hoyt Ruth, and his five-man crew were issued three World War I-era rifles.

Their task: Report the location of the six Japanese aircraft carriers, two battleships, assorted escort ships and hundreds of enemy airplanes that had been involved in the attack.

“This is going to be a one-way trip,” Ruth later said he thought.

But it wasn't.


An old drinking water kit was in the Sikorsky JRS-1 flying boat that sits in the restoration hangar of the Smithsonian National Air
and Space Museum. — Photograph: Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post.

Seventy-five years later, the Sikorsky JRS-1 amphibian, with its boat hull for the water and big tires for the runway, sits in the Udvar-Hazy Center’s restoration hangar, a venerable witness to the event that helped create modern America.

The Pearl Harbor attack, which plunged the United States into World War II, killed an estimated 2,400 Americans, wounded about 1,100, and destroyed ships, planes and facilities.

“The fact that [Ruth] got out and got back is … absolutely amazing,” Smithsonian museum specialist Pat Robinson said last month.

The plane would not have survived an encounter with the Japanese fleet, which it did not find, Robinson said in an interview at the center.

It was lucky not to have been shot down by jumpy American anti-aircraft gunners when it returned to Pearl Harbor, he said.

And it was a miracle that it was saved from the postwar scrap heap.

“Somewhere … someone looking at the log books realized the significance of the airplane, and where it had been,” and alerted the Smithsonian, which retrieved it from military storage, Robinson said.

“It's a huge deal, to have this here,” he said. “It represents American involvement in the Second World War. It was there when it started.”

Indeed, the airplane has a presence, and the Smithsonian would one day like to restore it. But other historic planes are in line ahead of it.

The craft, constructed for the Navy in 1938 at the Sikorsky plant in Stratford, Connecticut, is big, with the two huge propeller engines built into the wing above the fuselage, a hatch in the nose where a photographer could stand, and porthole-style windows.

Inside it, the curators found an old emergency water purification kit and the rusted keys to a lockbox in the radio compartment.


Lockbox keys also were found on the plane, which had a boat-like hull to allow it land on water and wheels to come in on a runway.
 — Photograph: Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post.

The squadron was based on Ford Island, in the middle of Pearl Harbor, where the Navy's doomed battleships were parked.

Ruth, the pilot, who later lived in the Washington area and taught at the Bullis School in Potomac, Maryland, was in his bachelor's quarters on the island the morning of the attack.

A seasoned aviator, “he could fly anything,” his son, Thomas A. Ruth II, said recently.

A native of tiny De Smet, South Dakota, he was having breakfast when the Japanese planes came roaring in. He thought for a moment that it might be a drill, until he saw them dropping bombs.

“Then I knew for sure that we were in for trouble,” he said.

He would survive the war, but a younger brother, Thomas, who was also a Navy pilot, was shot down and killed in the South Pacific in 1943.

In videotaped accounts he gave over the years, Wes Ruth said he grabbed his coat that morning, jumped into his convertible and sped with the top down for the airstrip.

“I drove as fast as I could because … I was concerned about getting strafed,” he said.

As he neared the runway, the battleship USS Arizona had just blown up about a quarter-mile away. Pellets of gunpowder ejected from the blast began to fall from the sky.

“It was snowing powder pellets about as large as my finger,” Ruth said in a talk he gave in 2011. They fell in and around his car.


Wesley Hoyt Ruth, a pilot who took off and flew over Pearl Harbor after the attack on
December 7th, 1941. He was 28 and serving in Hawaii when this photograph was made.
He died last year at age 101 and is buried in Arlington Cemetery. — Family photograph.

As the Japanese attack ended, the Americans wanted to locate the fleet from which the enemy planes had come. Ruth was ordered to go find it. “You take the first plane, the JRS,” he said a senior officer told him.

He got into the plane with co-pilot Emery C. “Pappy” Geise, 35, radioman Oscar W. Benenfiel Jr., plane captain Amos P. Gallupe and two other sailors, according to the Smithsonian.

Before they left, the senior officer presented them with three old Springfield rifles for protection. “We would have to shoot through the windows,” Ruth said.

He thought the chances of surviving were zero.

The brightly colored plane took off and flew north, looking for the enemy.

Hours went by.

“Every second in the air was fraught with anxiety, apprehension, [and] anger,” a crewman on another search plane recalled, according to Pearl Harbor historian Craig Nelson. “If ever there was a suicide mission, this was one.”

Ruth said he flew just beneath the clouds, so he could duck into the cloud cover if there was trouble.

He flew 250 miles to the north but saw nothing. He turned east for 10 miles, then headed back south 250 miles toward Pearl Harbor. Still nothing.

Although the enemy fleet was still lurking north of Pearl Harbor, Ruth and his crew made no contact.

But then they had to get back to Ford Island without getting shot down by their comrades. Numerous American planes were mistaken for the enemy and shot at by nervous Americans on the ground, according to historians.

Again, Ruth and his men were lucky. They arrived unscathed.

Following the attack, the plane was moved to a base in California and later handed over to the forerunner of NASA for testing purposes, Robinson said. After that it went into storage until its importance was noticed and it was given to the Smithsonian.

Ruth died last year at 101 in Matthews, North Carolina. He was buried in January in Arlington National Cemetery.

For his actions at Pearl Harbor, he was given the Navy Cross, the service's second-highest decoration for heroism.

“Although contact with the enemy meant almost certain destruction,” his citation reads, Ruth's courage, airmanship and skill “were at all times inspiring and in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.”

• Mike is a general assignment reporter at The Washington Post who also covers Washington institutions and historical topics.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/after-pearl-harbor-this-mail-plane-had-a-new-mission-find-the-attackers/2016/12/01/34216070-a1f5-11e6-a44d-cc2898cfab06_story.html

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from The Washington Post....

One died at Pearl Harbor, the other lived.
Seventy-five years later, they’ll be reunited.

As swarms of Japanese airplanes began attacking the USS Arizona on December 7th, 1941,
John Anderson asked his turret commander if he could join his brother out on deck.
“He needs help,” Anderson said. But then an enormous explosion occurred.

By MICHAEL E. RUANE | 7:00AM EST - Tuesday, December 06, 2016


From left, Terry Anderson and Karolyn Anderson, both of Roswell, New Mexico; Travis Anderson, of Kurtistown, Hawaii;
and John D. Anderson Jr., of Carlsbad, New Mexico, traveled to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii where John D. Anderson's ashes
are to be interred underwater in the remnants of his old turret aboard the USS Arizona. He will rejoin his twin,
Delbert “Jake” Anderson, whose body was never recovered from the ship after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
 — Photograph: Kent Nishimura/The Washington Post.

PEARL HARBOUR, HAWAII — When John D. Anderson reached his battle station in the USS Arizona's No.4 turret that morning, he realized the gigantic guns could do nothing against the swarms of attacking Japanese airplanes.

But his twin brother, Delbert “Jake” Anderson, was manning an anti-aircraft gun out on deck, and was in the thick of the action. “He needs help,” John told his turret commander, and asked if could join his brother.

Both men were 24. The sons of a judge, they were born in Verona, North Dakota, in 1917. Both had joined the Navy in 1936. John was a boatswain's mate second class; Jake, a boatswain's mate first class.

Both wound up on the Arizona, which at that moment on December 7th, 1941, was a maelstrom of fire, smoke and explosions.

They would never meet up that Sunday morning, and only one would survive the day.

On Wednesday, 75 years later, John Anderson's ashes are to be interred underwater in the remnants of his old turret, rejoining Jake, whose body was never recovered from the ship.

The Arizona interment is one of two scheduled for Wednesday that, along with many other commemorations this week, will probably mark the last major anniversary of the attack attended by survivors.

The brothers' reunion, on the anniversary of the attack, brings together one twin who enjoyed a long and varied life, and one whose life stopped at Pearl Harbor.

John lived through the rest of the war. He settled in Roswell, New Mexico, became a local TV personality and died last year at age 98, one of the Arizona's last survivors. Only five of the original 334 are left.

Jake is eternally 24, still “aboard” the Arizona and one the first Americans killed in World War II.

John's family said they believed they should rest together.

“He talked all the time about his brother,” John's son, John D. Anderson Jr., said in a telephone interview last month. They “wrote letters back and forth to each other when they were on different ships. And Jake really wanted him to get on the Arizona with him.”

“They were really close,” he said.

During the attack, while searching the inferno for his brother, John was ordered off the battleship by an officer.

“I'm not leaving,” he told the officer, according to a 2011 oral history recorded by videographer Don Smith. “My brother's here some place. I've got to find him.”

“He couldn't have made it,” he said the officer replied, and shoved John into a rescue vessel.

But after they reached shore, John grabbed an empty boat and went back to the Arizona in the midst of the attack, nearly losing his life in the process.

“He just kept saying, ‘I've got to find my brother, I've got to find my brother’,” his son recalled.

A wrenching moment in history

Warden was just going back for seconds … when this blast shuddered by under the floor and rattled the cups on the tables…. He stopped in the doorway … and looked back at the mess-hall. He remembered the picture the rest of his life. It had become very quiet and everybody had stopped eating and looked up at each other…. “This is it,” somebody said quite simply.

 — James Jones, “From Here to Eternity”

Seventy-five years later, the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor remains one of the most wrenching and intimate events in American history.

As with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, or the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, people remembered where they were when they heard the news.

The cost of the attack was stunning: On the Arizona alone, 1,177 sailors and Marines were killed. More than 900 of them were never recovered.

Thirteen hundred more people died on other ships and elsewhere around the harbor.

Many men were blown apart. One survivor recalled that the sky “rained sailors.” Another remembered dozens of Navy hats floating on the surface of the water.

Eleven hundred men were wounded, many horribly burned.

“Flames from the inferno leapt up the metal steps and barred our escape,” Arizona survivor Donald Stratton, now 94, wrote in his new memoir, “All the Gallant Men”

“My T-shirt had caught fire, burning my arms and my back,” he wrote. “My legs were burned from my ankles to my thighs. My face was seared. The hair on my head had been singed off, and part of my ear was gone.”

Eighteen U.S. warships were sunk or crippled, along with hundreds of planes destroyed and damaged. The Arizona went down, as did the battleship USS Oklahoma, entombing hundreds of sailors when it capsized.

(Today, newly exhumed remains of the Oklahoma's sailors are still being identified in Defense Department labs.)


The battleship USS Arizona burns in the Hawaiian port of Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, after being hit by Japanese
carrier-based strike aircraft. — Photograph: Reuters.

The Japanese, gambling that they could cripple U.S. forces as they expanded their Asian empire, launched the daring attack with 31 ships, including six aircraft carriers, and more than 350 airplanes.

Their armada sailed in secret across the stormy northern Pacific Ocean to within striking distance of Hawaii. Its only encounter was with a lone Soviet freighter, which steamed by in silence.

The Americans, although forewarned, were overconfident, dismissive of Japanese capabilities, and not expecting the blow to come at Pearl Harbor, historians say.

The first U.S. servicemen killed in World War II were three soldiers in two Piper Cubs shot down while on a sightseeing flight as the attack began about 7:55 a.m.

Some Americans threw tools, potatoes and binoculars at the enemy aircraft. Others could only shake their fists.

A frantic radiogram went out: “AIRRAID ON PEARLHARBOR X THIS IS NO DRILL.”

The effect was electrifying.

“Pearl Harbor absolutely shattered Americans' image of themselves,” said historian Steve Twomey, author of “Countdown to Pearl Harbor”.

The country saw itself as having a fine Army and Navy, and the protection of two oceans. “The wars were always ‘over there’,” he said.

But within hours that Sunday “millions of families knew … that their sons and their brothers and their fathers were going to go war … and many of them were not going to come back,” he said.

The attack would bring 9 million Americans into the war, and create the powerhouse United States of the 21st century, said historian Craig Nelson, author of “Pearl Harbor, From Infamy to Greatness”.

“Almost every aspect … of the United States and its international position in the world … comes from the reaction to Pearl Harbor,” he said.

It also gave history President Franklin D. Roosevelt's legendary “A date which will live in infamy” speech, delivered to Congress the next day.

It produced the slogan “Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition,” uttered by Lietenant j.g. Howell M. Forgy, a chaplain on the embattled cruiser USS New Orleans.

And it provided the story of the heroic African American sailor Dorie Miller, a 22-year-old mess attendant on the USS West Virginia who manned an anti-aircraft gun and opened fire on enemy planes.

Miller was decorated for valor, but was killed in the sinking of a ship he was on later in the war.

Many of the sailors, soldiers and Marines at Pearl Harbor were children of the Depression and the Dust Bowl who had joined the service to escape poverty and starvation.

The 1,500-man crew on the Arizona was similar in size to the population of some of the small towns the sailors had come from. Now they had hot meals, a hammock to sleep in and a steady paycheck.

‘The Japanese are here’

John Anderson had just made the arrangements for church services on the Arizona's fantail that Sunday and had gone to the mess hall to get some breakfast. Suddenly, he heard a loud explosion.

“I thought, ‘What in the dickens is that?’” he said in his video account. He went out on the deck, “looked up and saw this plane dipping … and it had red balls on its wings,” he said.

“I said a cuss word and said, ‘The Japanese are here’,” he remembered.

He hurried to sound the alarm, but before he could, a bomb fell nearby and “knocked me silly.”

He got up and ran to his battle station in the turret, which had huge 14-inch guns to fire at enemy ships. “I was a gunner,” he said. “I got into the seat and said, ‘Manned and ready’.”

But he hadn't seen any enemy ships or enemy shell fire. “There's all bombs and machine gun fire,” he said he told the turret captain. “We can't do any good in here. We need some gunners on the anti-aircraft batteries.”

“I'd like to get out there and get on a gun with my brother,” he said. The Andersons were among 26 sets of brothers on the ship, but the only twins. The turret captain gave him the okay.


LEFT: An undated photo of sailor Delbert “Jake” Anderson, who was killed on the USS Arizona. | RIGHT: An undated
photo of John D. “Andy” Anderson, who survived Pearl Harbor. He tried to search for his brother during the attack,
but John Anderson was ordered off the battleship by an officer. — Photographs: Anderson family.

Anderson left the turret, and started up a ladder to the anti-aircraft guns.

“I got to the top of the ladder and an enormous explosion occurred,” he said. “People were blown all over the place, all kinds of body parts … and tremendous fires broke out.”

He was driven back toward the turret. “On my way back, I grabbed a guy by the hand who was on fire, and I held on to him,” he said. “He was from Greenfield, Ohio. I never forgot that. I saved him. I got him out of there.”

Meanwhile, officers were ordering survivors off the doomed ship, as more bombs struck. Anderson refused to go until he was forced. Reaching Ford Island, in the middle of the harbor, he looked back at the Arizona.

It was still on fire, but his brother and others were out there. He spotted a small boat floating by with nobody in it, and with a buddy swam out, got in and headed back to the ship.

There, he gathered three wounded men into the boat. There was no sign of Jake. “We had to take what we could get,” he said, and they headed for shore. As they did, the boat was hit and blown apart.

Anderson said his buddy and the three wounded sailors were lost. “I was the only one left alive,” he said. He made it to shore and collapsed on the beach.

After the attack ended, he was assigned to another ship, became part of Navy raiding parties and fought his way across the Pacific — “in so many scrapes and fights that I forgot the names of the places.”

At first, he heard nothing of Jake, but he was told later that someone had seen him felled at his post by gunfire.

“That was the last anybody ever had on my brother,” he said.

On Wednesday afternoon, about 40 members of his family are scheduled to gather at the USS Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor as they return Anderson to what is left of Turret No.4, and to his shipmates and his brother.

• Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this story.

• Mike is a general assignment reporter at The Washington Post who also covers Washington institutions and historical topics.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related stories:

 • VIDEO: The USS Arizona wasn't supposed to be at Pearl Harbor, but it became America's most famous battleship

 • After Pearl Harbor, this mail plane had a new mission: Find the attackers

 • Remains of Pearl Harbor's hero priest identified after almost 75 years

 • Remains of sailor killed at Pearl Harbor finally make their way home

 • USS Oklahoma's dead just now being identified

 • USS Arizona still leaking oil, decades after Pearl Harbor attack

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/one-died-at-pearl-harbor-the-other-lived-seventy-five-years-later-theyll-be-reunited/2016/12/05/79fdeee8-aaa0-11e6-977a-1030f822fc35_story.html

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from The Washington Post....

The attack on Pearl Harbor united Americans like no other event in our history

Seventy-five years ago was the last time the nation truly came together.

By CRAIG SHIRLEY and SCOTT MAUER | 6:00AM EST - Wednesday, December 07, 2016


A small boat rescues a USS West Virginia crew member from the water after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. — Photograph: Associated Press.

THE UNITED STATES prides itself in being a unified country. The Pledge of Allegiance declares us “one nation under God.” The Declaration of Independence also says we are “united Colonies,” and the Preamble to the Constitution says, “We the People of the United States, to form a more perfect Union.”

And yet throughout history, we the people have rarely been interested in coming together for a common cause. We may be united in government, but we certainly aren't in policies. During the American Revolution against British imperial rule, approximately 20 percent of the population took up the cause of the Loyalists and supported King George III. The Civil War, less than a century after the Revolution, is the prime example of divisiveness: South versus North, slaveholders versus abolitionists, states' rights versus federal rights. The war led to hundreds of thousands of American deaths on both sides. Most other wars — the War of 1812, the Spanish-American War, the First World War, Vietnam, Iraq (twice; three times counting the Islamic State), Afghanistan — were met with fierce opposition on one end and fierce support on the other.

Throughout the 240 years of U.S. history, we have only been truly united twice. September 11th, 2001 was a brief moment, only to be forgotten and lost in the rabbles and divisiveness of the domestic and foreign policies of the so-called War on Terror. Fifteen years later, through President George W. Bush's two terms and President Obama’s two, we still bicker and argue over what was and is being done in the Middle East. It will continue for the foreseeable future, making whatever unity we once had on that day irrelevant.

The other time we as a country were united for a cause — one that actually lasted more than a few months — was immediately following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Empire of Japan on the morning of December 7th, 1941.


American ships burn during the attack. — Photograph: Associated Press.


The U.S. Pacific Fleet burns. — Photograph: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.

The war in Europe — not yet called the Second World War — was simply known as “the emergency.” The invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany in 1939, followed by hostilities from England, France, Italy and the Soviet Union, was continuing in full swing. In June 1941, Germany opened up a second front, plowing straight into the heart of Russian territory. It was all a European matter. The United States was protected and secure between two giant oceans. And so, many thinking they were safe, it was believed that there was no need for the United States to join in the fight. Yet. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president since 1933, was determined to lend a helping hand to Britain. On May 11, 1941, he signed the Lend-Lease agreement, which allowed the United States to give military aid to Britain in their time of need. But it was fraught with political risk for FDR.

On the other side of the spectrum were the likes of the U.S. ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy, who said to The Boston Globe that “democracy is finished in England. It may be here.” He also argued that the war in Europe was not for democracy, but self-preservation — an important point of contrast if the United States wanted to help. One of the biggest institutions of isolationists was the “America First” movement, which sprang up into action when Germany invaded Poland several years earlier. People from across the political spectrum were members, from 1928 Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith to aviator Charles Lindbergh. Political opinions did not matter, as long as the interest of keeping America out of the war came first. Likewise, opponents to the America First-ers were on both sides of the aisle, from FDR to Republican nominee Wendell Willkie. The American First Movement was popular; both Republicans and Democrats were members. In the 1930s, Democrats in Congress passed various Neutrality Acts, which codified the isolationism of the United States.

That all changed after December 7th.

The immediate aftermath of the attacks on Pearl Harbor, where hundreds of Japanese planes and bombers destroyed and damaged 19 American ships and destroyed nearly 200 planes, resulting in the deaths of 2,403 American men, women and children, was confusion and shock. How could this happen, how did this get through, why did they do this?

First lady Eleanor Roosevelt, that night via a national radio broadcast, pleaded with every American to “go about our daily business more determined than ever to do the ordinary things as well as we can and when we find a way to do anything more in our communities to help others, to build morale, to give a feeling of security, we must do it. Whatever is asked of us I am sure we can accomplish it. We are the free and unconquerable people of the United States of America.”


Wreckage, identified by the U.S. Navy as a Japanese torpedo plane, is salvaged from the bottom of Pearl Harbor following the attack.
 — Photograph: Associated Press.


Sailors stand amid wreckage, watching as the USS Shaw explodes on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor. — Photograph: Getty Images.

After the initial shock, though, Americans went to work. They had a cause.

President Roosevelt declared war on Japan on December 8th before a joint session of Congress. Senators and representatives who — no more than 48 hours earlier — were champions of isolationism and critics of FDR were now in full support of war. “There is no politics here. There is only one party when it comes to the integrity and honor of this country,” said House Minority Leader Joseph Martin. Willkie, who ran against Roosevelt the year before, said, “I have not the slightest doubt as to what a united America should and will do.”

Less than an hour after the president gave his famed “date that will live in infamy” speech, Congress voted nearly unanimously for war with Japan. In the Senate, the vote was 82—0; the House vote was 388—1. The sole opposing vote, from Representative Jeannette Rankin (Republican-Montana), was met with boos and hisses. Rankin, who had voted against World War I in her first term in Congress, also abstained from voting for war against Germany and Italy. These votes effectively ended her political career.

The America First Committee dissolved, never to be seen again in any sort of political or ideological structure again. “The time for military action is here,” said national chairman Robert Wood on December 11th. “Therefore the America First Committee has determined immediately to cease all functions and to dissolve…. There is no longer any question about our involvement … [and] can be completely defined in one word, victory.” Wood had been a hero of the First World War, and he knew danger when he saw it. Another isolationist group, Mothers of American Sons, similarly disbanded and promised all funds to go to the war effort. The Mothers had the slogan, “We want our sons to live in peace, not rest in peace on European battlefields.”


A jumbled mass of wreckage in front of the battleship USS Pennsylvania constitutes the remains of
the destroyers USS Downes and USS Cassin. — Photograph: Getty Images.

Food and gas rationing, victory gardens, Civil Defense volunteers, scrap metal drives, paper drives, rubber drives — all these stood as tangible evidence of the unity of Americans in the days after Pearl Harbor.

Revenue from war bonds bought from every walk of life were flowing in, and donations for the war effort were staking up. Bonds were a popular Christmas gift, selling from $25 to $1,000 apiece. One man, too old to fight, donated $25 for the effort; another woman sent simply $5. A senior class at Baird High School in Texas used $37.50 planned for their class picnic to buy bonds instead. A man in Manhattan, George Herman Ruth Jr., wanted to buy $100,000 worth of war bonds — he was told that the maximum was $50,000, so he bought half in December 1941 and half in January 1942. (You may know him better by his nickname, Babe.) Archbishop Francis Joseph Spellman of New York donated $1,000 to the Red Cross, and even gave “one pint of ecclesiastical blood,” as Time magazine reported.

Later in December 1941, just four days before Christmas, Roosevelt declared that New Year's Day should be considered a “Universal Day of Prayer.”

“We are confident in our devotion to country, in our love of freedom, in our inheri­tance of strength,” he said. “But our strength, as the strength of all men everywhere, is of greater avail as God upholds us. [It will be] a day of … asking forgiveness for our shortcomings of the past, of consecration to the tasks of the present, of asking God's help in days to come.” So when New Year’s Eve came and went, amid wonder about what the future of the world held, Americans everywhere went to their respective churches to pray. Roosevelt himself wrote a prayer, sent out with the highest priority across the globe. In a strong, meaningful call for unity and call for strength, Roosevelt said that “the new year of 1942 calls for the courage and the resolution of old and young to help win a world struggle in order that we may preserve all we hold dear.”


A small boat rescues sailors. — Photograph: Getty Images.


An aerial view showing the U.S. Pacific Fleet consumed by the flames. — Photograph: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.

Before December 7th, the Navy and Army were severely undermanned, partly because of their own doing. Twenty percent of men who applied were rejected for “defective teeth,” an odd reason. Due to the Selective Service being too selective, a year before the attacks, only 51,000 men were enlisted in the Army Air Corps. Some, when they were selected, refused to join as “conscientious objectors.” The Navy similarly had troubles filling their ranks.

After that fateful day, though, enlistment and recruitment offices were full to the brim. Birmingham, Alabama, had 600 men volunteer in the first few hours after the attacks, many too young to even enlist. Boston's recruitment offices had hundreds waiting in lines for hours, bonding with their newfound friends. “All recruiting records of the nation's armed forces were shattered … as thousands of men attempted to enlist for combat duty in the Army, Navy, Marine Corps or Coast Guard,” reported The New York Times on December 10th. Brigadier General Louis B. Hershey, director of the Selective Service Administration, even floated the idea of enlisting women, an issue controversial even to modern sentiment, let alone in the 1940s. Indeed, many women wanted to do their part — from wishing to enlist to donating their silk stockings for war use.

In the next four years, the United States was united against the Axis. The next several years saw the defeat of two empires and the rise of the United States as a global superpower. That is how unity works. That is how a surprise attack on a small island nearly 3,000 miles away from continental land changed the very fabric and very culture of a country. Before that fateful day, many people on the mainland would have had trouble identifying where Pearl Harbor was. It was a place of no real importance to the everyday American in Kansas or New York.  After December 7th, it had the entire country march hand-in-hand into battle and into victory.

• Craig Shirley is the author of four books on Ronald Reagan, including the newly released “Last Act: The Final Years and Enduring Legacy of Ronald Reagan”.

• Scott Mauer is the primary research assistant to Craig Shirley. He has a master's degree in humanities and history from Hood College in Frederick, Maryland.

__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on this topic:

 • VIDEO: FDR's ‘Infamy’ speech

 • 75 years ago, what if Japan never attacked Pearl Harbor?

 • AP WAS THERE: 75 years ago, the Associated Press reported on Pearl Harbor

 • PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY: What the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor looked like

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/12/07/the-attack-on-pearl-harbor-united-americans-like-no-other-event-in-our-history

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

Seventy-five years after Pearl Harbor attack,
survivors gather to honor those lost

The attack killed about 2,400 people and forced the U.S. into World War II.

By MICHAEL E. RUANE | 2:21PM EST - Wednesday, December 07, 2016


USS Arizona survivor Louis Conter signs autographs before the start of a ceremony commemorating the 75th anniversary of
the attack on Pearl Harbor at Kilo Pier on December 7th, 2016, in Honolulu. — Photograph: Kent Nishimura/Getty Images.

PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII — Seventy-five years after Japanese warplanes streaked over the hills here, laid waste to the harbor, and forced the United States into the cataclysm of World War II, thousands gathered on a placid Wednesday morning to pay tribute to those who died that day.

Many assembled on a covered pier that jutted near the spot where remnants of the USS Arizona rest just beneath the surface, unmoved since it was shattered by enemy bombs on the morning of December 7th, 1941, killing 1,177 sailors and Marines.

Those in attendance came from across the country — including wrinkled old men from small towns, who as young men had been here and still choke up at the memory of lost shipmates.

“We lived through it, came home, got married, had children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, and lived a big life,” Louis Conter, 95, who had been on the Arizona, said the day before.

“They lost theirs immediately, and they're the ones that should be called heroes,” he said.

The dignitaries assembled on flag-bedecked Kilo Pier around sunrise, just about the time the first wave of 350 enemy planes from six aircraft carriers attacked that Sunday morning, sinking the battleships USS Arizona and USS Oklahoma and crippling a dozen other vessels.

The attack also destroyed planes and buildings in the area, and killed about 2,400 people. Eleven hundred were wounded.

In some ways, Wednesday morning was like the one 75 years ago, with ships tied up, and the sun turning the scattered clouds a pinkish blue. And, like that day, it was hard to imagine so violent an attack in such a peaceful spot.

There was moment of silence during the proceedings, broken by a flyover of roaring Air Force fighter jets, and the mournful horn of a guided missile destroyer that glided by, a huge American flag waving in salute.

All week, the community has been filled with visitors here to remember the day of “infamy,” as President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it.

Some on Wednesday wore T-shirts emblazoned with pictures of individual survivors, and the names of ships they served on.

The Navy's Pacific Fleet Band, clad in white, played marches — an act reminiscent of the bands that were playing aboard ships as the attack began in 1941.


Pearl Harbor survivor Donald Barnhart, center, shakes the hand of a United States Marine while leaving the 75th Anniversary National
Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day Commemoration on Kilo Pier at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam on Wednesday, December 7th, 2016,
in Honolulu. Survivors of the Japanese attack, dignitaries and ordinary citizens attended the ceremony.
 — Photograph: Eugene Tanner/Associated Press.

Pearl Harbor survivors have been thronged with people eager to express gratitude, grab a selfie and hear their stories.

Well-wishers waited in a long line to have Don Stratton, 94, of Colorado Springs, sign copies of his new memoir, “All the Gallant Men”.

Stratton, one of only a handful of Arizona survivors left, was terribly burned on the battleship and escaped by climbing hand over hand across a rope that someone had thrown from a neighboring vessel.

“I don't know how I made it,” he said. “But I'm here. It was quite a day.”

“I got a lot of shipmates out there,” he said Tuesday, referring to the wreck in the harbor, as he sat in a USS Arizona ball cap at a book-signing table at the National Park Service site here.

He owed them a salute of honor, “and I'm here to do that,” he said.

Visitors also crowded around James DeWitt, 95, of Culver, Indiana, as he sat in his wheelchair at the Park Service site.

He had been aboard the USS Antares, a supply ship that was towing a barge into Pearl Harbor, when the attack began.

“We [weren't] going very fast, and we didn't have an armament,” he said.

But the Antares spotted a Japanese submarine trying to sneak into the harbor, raised an early alarm and was later assailed by enemy planes.

DeWitt was 20 in 1941. He had joined the Navy in 1939.

The Antares had been at sea for 37 days and was just arriving at Pearl Harbor — “two and a half hours ahead of the Japanese,” he said. “We never did get into the harbor.”

He said he could see the smoke in the harbor from the first wave of attacking planes, and then the Antares, itself, became a target in the second attack, he said.

“There were eight of us on the bow of the ship … and somebody yells…. And we hit the deck. About that time, they opened fire…. But they were shooting at the bridge, thank goodness.”

He said he saw an enemy plane fly by. Asked what it looked like, he said, “Well, I didn't get too much time to look at it…. You could see the orange ball [insignia] under the wings.”


United States Navy Rear Admiral John Fuller, center, presides over the memorial service at the USS Arizona Memorial at Joint Base
Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Wednesday, December 7th, 2016, in Honolulu. Hawaii First Lady Dawn Amano-Ige, left, Hawaii Governor
David Ige, second from the left, United States Navy Senior Chaplain George Mendes, third from the left, Arizona First Lady
Angela Ducey, second from the right and Arizona Governor Douglas A. Ducey, right, look on. Survivors of the Japanese
attack, dignitaries and ordinary citizens attended a ceremony at Kilo Pier to commemorate the 75th anniversary of
the Japanese attack on the naval harbor. — Eugene Tanner/Associated Press.

Conter, of Grass Valley, California, told reporters on Tuesday of his last minutes on the Arizona, as the fires consumed the forward part of the ship and it gradually went under.

“We stayed on the after end, and pulled bodies and people out of the fire,” he said. “They were coming out of the fire. We laid them down on deck, and were putting them on boats to get them to the hospital.

“After about 40 minutes, we were getting water on the quarter deck up to our knees,” he said. An officer ordered “abandon ship,” he said. “We took what bodies we had, and what people we had, into the motor launch. We got them to the hospital.

“We came back, and fought the fire until Tuesday, before we got off,” he said. “It burned for three days.”

The Japanese launched the surprise attack, hoping they could cripple U.S. forces in the Pacific, as they expanded their Asian empire.

The remnants of the sunken USS Arizona, spanned by a white memorial arch, now rest adjacent to USS Missouri, the huge battleship on which the official Japanese surrender took place in 1945.

The Arizona, begun in 1914, and the Missouri, begun in 1941, were both built in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and were both state of the art in their day.

Now they are together, one sunk, one afloat, marking the beginning and the end of World War II for the United States and the men and women who served in it.

• Michael E. Ruane is a general assignment reporter at The Washington Post who also covers Washington institutions and historical topics.

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