I save things, so there is a good possibility that somewhere in a box in my attic is a copy of an interview I conducted in 1988 with a Texas man who survived the Japanese attack on the Pearl Harbor Naval Station on this date 73 years ago. But when I went to look for that piece last week, I couldn't find it. Nor could I find it in any online archive. So I cannot confirm what I think the man, who seemed remarkably old to me even then, told me about his experiences.
I cannot be sure I haven't conflated his account with others that I've read, or movie depictions I've seen. I know how plastic memory can be, how it can mold itself to preconceived forms and stop up gaps. I think I remember the man telling me how lucky he was to not be below the deck of the USS Arizona when the attack began. I think I remember him telling me that, although it was not his duty station, he manned an anti-aircraft gun and fired at the swarm of fighters and torpedo bombers, though I might be thinking of Cuba Gooding Jr. in that Jerry Bruckheimer movie.
I am more confident in my recollection of his description of Hotel Street, where sailors rented rooms by the hour, and the Black Cat Cafe, where the enlisted men congregated (the officers gravitated to Waikiki Beach, with its banyan trees and views of Diamond Head). Oahu was a sleepy island then, and drinking was its prime recreational activity. Apparently there were tensions between the locals and the servicemen, and sometimes things got violent, though my subject allowed he was always more worried about the truncheons of the Shore Patrol than Kanaka gangs.
I wish I'd written about that. A lot of what I think I remember about our conversation never made it into the article I eventually wrote.
And that is the trouble with history--every story is necessarily reductive and shaped to purpose. Maybe a newspaper columnist wants to make some point about how selfish, myopic and ungrateful people are these days, so he constructs a fable about a greater generation that saved the world before you were born.
It's not exactly untrue, but the point is less to honor the dying out than to shame the current herd. But I suspect that in the ways that matter, our grandparents or great-grandparents were not that much different from us. I suspect most human beings can talk themselves into anything. People say they don't understand how the German people could have elected Adolf Hitler, but I think I do.
I see people doing irrational things all the time. Mostly they're acting out of fear or misplaced loyalty, but sometimes they do so out of love. Or because what they perceive as their duty compels them. I don't know that any of us can be sure how we'd react until we're tested, but I know most of us should be grateful that we haven't been.
There are only nine men who served on the USS Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor who are still alive. All of them are in their 90s, and I'm pretty sure my guy isn't one of them. Four of them are going out to the memorial today to drink a toast and remember, though I'm sure they don't need the visuals to remind them of what they lived through. It is supposed to be the last reunion, but a couple of them say they'll come back next year. And maybe the year after that.
If you or I had been on the Arizona that day, we probably would have died. That's just what the numbers say--1,177 men died on the ship that day; only 335 survived. She was sunk by an explosion that will probably never be definitely explained but may have been caused by a Japanese bomb igniting an oil fire which subsequently caused a magazine containing more than 1,000 pounds of black powder to explode, sending a fireball more than 500 feet in the air, engulfing the ship. The ship immediately sank, while the part exposed above the water burned for two days.
The attack on Pearl Harbor lasted about as long as a popcorn flick, about 110 minutes.
After it was over, 21 ships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet had been sunk or badly damaged. There were 188 American planes destroyed and 159 damaged, most of them hit while on the ground. Total American casualties are listed at 2,403, among them 68 civilians (some of whom were killed when U.S. anti-aircraft fire fell short of the high-altitude Japanese bombers and landed in Honolulu).
The Japanese lost 29 planes, a little less than 10 percent of the attacking force. The usual number given for their casualties is 63. And, though he was never officially acknowledged by the Japanese command, there was a naval officer/prisoner of war taken, a 21-year-old midget sub commander named Kazuo Sakamaki, whose unconscious body was discovered near his beached sub by a member of the Hawaiian National Guard. Sakamaki was part of a select force chosen for what was seen as a kamikaze mission--he expected to die during the attack and when he woke up in an American hospital, he begged his captors to allow him to commit suicide. The Imperial Navy had a no-surrender policy; Sakamaki had been indoctrinated to choose between victory and a heroic death.
Sakamaki would spend the war in prisoner of war camps in Louisiana and Wisconsin, and when he returned to Japan after the war he was a committed pacifist. He wrote a memoir, which was later translated into English and published as I Attacked Pearl Harbor. In the book he talked about receiving letters urging him to kill himself, but he managed to overcome the deep shame, to marry and raise a family. He went on to be an executive with Toyota in Brazil.
He died in 1999.
From this distance, it is not difficult to imagine that Kazuo Sakamaki was a human being not too different from the people he was sent to fight and kill. If you go to the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, you will almost certainly see respectful Japanese tourists taking photographs and listening to the audio tour. Most of them are like most of us--Pearl Harbor was something that happened before they were born.
There are only about 2,000 Americans who survived Pearl Harbor still living. And after they are gone, I suppose we'll still remember, in the way we remember the Gettysburg Address or Caesar's legions. We may have a map, but not the territory. And we will make up pretty stories to replace the ones that we have lost.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 12/07/2014