Later this month, Christmas Eve will find me awaiting the annual Holiday for the 90th time and I can compare this one with only one other: Christmas 1941. Both days find the citizens of America facing a threatened future under siege from a devastating enemy attack; one by powerful allied military armies and the other by microscopic organisms that, while unseen, prove to be equally as deadly.
Seventeen days before Christmas 1941, Japanese aircraft made their tactical attack on Pearl Harbor causing awful damage to American warships and military installations. While it was a shocking blow to an unprepared nation, key facts of the raid would prove critical to the final success of the American response. The battleships damaged in the raid were not the aircraft carriers that would make the difference in coming sea battles with Japanese forces. Also, the Japanese raiders failed to destroy the storage farms of petroleum fuel.
While the attack was greeted with wide celebrations in Japan, naval Marshal General Isoroku Yamamoto had a more prescient assessment of the attack: "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve," he wrote. He was right. America rose up under the masterful leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He organized the massive mobilization of the nation's industrial power while communicating with the souls of individual citizens. I remember sitting around our radio, Mama and Daddy and my two sisters, listening to the calm voice (I can still hear his tone) of the President focusing our attention to the mission that would lead us to victory. He united the nation as it had never been before. And never has been since.
What a difference in America today. We find the gifts under the tree to be sour apples and spoiled dreams with over a quarter million of our fellow citizens dead from the silent enemy. Other millions of children without food to eat. The economy in free fall. After the original attack there was no calm voice of a leader to unite us in a massive counter-attack with organizing plans and challenges to individual citizen warriors. We do have a lot to fear.
I still have the official card that identifies me as an air watch volunteer (Mama and me during a four hour shift once a week) to identify (we went to silhouette classes) any Japanese bombers we feared were coming in those early war months. None of their aircraft got through on our watch.
I'll take Christmas 1941 over this one. There'll be bluebirds over, the white cliffs of Dover, tomorrow, just you wait and see.
