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December 07, 2005
On Pearl Harbor Day
On this Pearl Harbor Day, I can’t help but think about the passing generation for whom Dec. 7, 1941, changed the world. Or about the day nearly 60 years later, Sept. 11, 2001, that was so often compared to it in the aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers.
9/11 changed the world, too, but maybe not as drastically as it seemed at the time. Almost involuntarily, I paused my remote on Fox the other night long enough to hear Bill O’Reilly declaring that America is now fighting World War III and everyone should recognize that. He seemed to want to pin down his guests on this point, hoping they would disagree with him so he could question their patriotism, not to mention their intelligence.
But let’s leave that argument for another day. The story in today’s Monitor about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor discusses how popular culture – video games in this case, but the argument also applies to Hollywood – distorts what happened that day. The story quotes a veteran who says that as long as veterans of Pearl Harbor are around, they’ll give the public “the straight poop.” But how long will that be? And how many people care to read in any detail what historians dig up about this disaster?
This question is especially pertinent to me because I have been helping a man named Steve Raymond prepare his memoir for publication. Steve will turn 90 next June, but he wrote the memoir decades ago from diaries and notes he kept during three and a half years as a prisoner of war. He was not at Pearl Harbor but in the Philippines, which the Japanese also attacked.
His account of that day recalls the meager response of the unprepared American force and the utter shock and confusion of the troops. When General Edward King surrendered the American troops on the Bataan Peninsula four months later, Steve started on the Bataan Death March. Our working title for his memoir is Bataan and Beyond: My Three and a Half Years as a Slave. We’re nearing the finish line in preparing the manuscript, and I’m hoping the book will be published next fall.
Long passages of the memoir are relentlessly gruesome. Fake gore sells in video games and movies, but I wonder if the public has the stomach for the reality Steve and his fellow captives endured.
My main reason for working on the project is a belief in the importance of history. One man’s memoir is but a drop of history, but we should squeeze out every drop we can, especially while the people who lived it still walk among us. Whatever doubts we might have about the place of history in our culture, future generations who seek to know the past will find it only if we leave it for them.
Posted by Mike Pride at December 7, 2005 09:32 AM