We’ve come to a place in time where some of us were adults, or nearly so, on the day President Kennedy was assassinated, November 22, 1963, but I wonder if any of us even have parents who remember the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, except as small children?
HONOLULU (AP) — Survivors of the 1941 Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor have long been the center of a remembrance ceremony held each year on the military base’s waterfront.
But today only 12 are still alive — all centenarians — and this year none is able to make the pilgrimage to Hawaii to mark the event, scheduled for Sunday.
That means no one attending will have firsthand memories of serving during the attack, which killed more than 2,300 troops and catapulted the U.S. into World War 2. The development is not a surprise and is an evolution of an ongoing trend. As survivors fade, their descendants and the public are increasingly turning to other ways of learning about the bombing.
“The idea of not having a survivor there for the first time — I just, I don’t know — it hurt my heart in a way I can’t describe,” said Kimberlee Heinrichs, whose 105-year-old father Ira “Ike” Schab had to cancel plans to fly in from Oregon after falling ill.
Survivors have been present every year in recent memory except for 2020, when the Navy and the National Park Service closed the observance to the general public because of coronavirus pandemic health risks.
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My mother and my siblings (I wasn’t born yet) had to be evacuated from Juneau, AK after Pearl Harbor. My father was able to stay there because he was doing essential road construction work. In 1943, she had to apply for an entry permit to go up and see her husband. I still have that document.
12/7/41 was my mother’s 10th birthday. Worst birthday ever, as you can imagine. She’s gone now, but her husband (my stepfather) is 92 and remembers it distinctly.
My 92 year old stepdad remembers it but my 87 year old mom doesn’t. This is the first year (except for Covid 2020) where no survivors will attend the ceremony. The very few who are still alive are too frail or ill to make the trip.
Well, 84th anniversaries are like that. You gotta be 90+ to have a chance to remember it.
My now-deceased parents were just over and under age 10 that day. Their parents, my grandparents, were late middle age: 40-50+. For that era both my parents were quite late babies with much older than then-typical parents.
My parents definitely both remembered it. I recall asking them when I was in high school. It was a class assignment during a unit on WWII to ask your parents what they remembered. Most kids’ parents were too young. That question was just aging out as a good HS homework assignment then (early-mid 1970s). A few years previously I bet almost all kids’ parents would have had memories.
I also know direct from his Mom (my GM) that she was majorly relieved when the war ended a few months before he’d have reached draft age. The US propaganda machine had been preparing the public for the casualties expected in the invasion of the Japanese home islands. For which Dad would’ve been the perfect age. Yipes!
My father was 8 years old. I’ve actually never talked with him about it, but I’ll be seeing him on Tuesday, so I’ll try to ask what he remembers about it.
I’m just “reporting in” to say that I was born three days before the Pearl Harbor Attack of 1941.
My earliest actual memories are fused in with images from photos (hundreds of them) that
my parents and other relatives have kept and shared with me.
Add to that the images from movies and old newsreels and it is practically impossible to pinpoint where my actual memories start.
I prefer to think that anything before grade school (1948) is a “blended memory” from various sources and practically none of it “actual memory” of my own.
I suspect others my age (just turned 84) must have well-developed memories to be able to go straight to personal recollections of that period.
My SO’s mother was on a bus from Kailua to Honolulu to her work as a legal secretary (Japanese Americans didn’t sleep in on Sunday mornings) when the IJN stuck on either side of her at Kaneohe and Pearl. Her future husband was himself driving another bus while antiaircraft rounds landed in Honolulu, which meant he’d miss his other gig later at Waikiki as a hotel beach boy. One of her first cousins was serving in the IJN (no idea if he was involved in the attack).
Her father, of the samurai class, having been sent to Hawaii to see that the sugarcane field hands didn’t lose their national identity, had started a Japanese school: calligraphy, kendo, etc. He’d been approached by inept Nazi spy Bernard Kuehn, but had nothing to offer even if he’d known the intent. Nonetheless, J. Edgar Hoover personally ordered his prosecution; so he received beatings and spent the war behind the wire; teaching calligraphy but not kendo. His wife scrubbed floors to maintain the family during his imprisonment, and when he returned she stayed in bed for a full month.
Meanwhile in Los Angeles, my dad (coincidentally, his own uncle Walter had been fired by personal order of J. Edgar Hoover after Volney Davis overpowered him and escaped, and died of exhaustion two years later) went to school the next day and saw his classmates curious and amused at something in the water fountain. Coming close, he saw it was a quarter-sized scrap of flesh cut from a Japanese-American child earlier in the morning.
My mom was almost 11 when Pearl Harbor was attacked, she still remembers not only the day, but that her two older brother enlisted the following week. Her other brother and my dad enlisted as soon as they turned 17 in 1943.
I expect more national attention may be paid to PHD next year—people do tend to like the “big” numbers (85 somehow seeming more momentous than 84).
Along with the Holocaust, PHD will come to be remembered without first-hand live testimony. We have to hope that historians have amassed a lot of reminiscences over the past decades, which can be shared anew.
(My parents were old enough to be aware of the attack, but never talked about it.)
Dang, that’s kinda crazy to think about. I wonder if my kids will have an assignment like that for 9/11.
Dan Carlin shares a similar story about his stepdad in his episode about the nuclear bombing of Japan - IIRC, his stepfather was on a ship in the Pacific ready to be shipped to the Home Islands when the bombs fell. Carlin says that to this day (or till he passed, I forget which) he maintained that the bombs saved his life, because he was convinced he would not have survived the invasion.
Actually, as I googled something related to my prior post, I learned something new.
The army was expecting so many casualties (and therefore premade so many Purple Hearts in advance to prepare for all these deaths) that to this day Purple Heart medals that are given out by the US come from that batch they made in preparation for Operation Downfall.
So maybe the guys who thought they wouldn’t have survived had a pretty good point.
My GF’s Mom just turned 93 this past week. Mom lives in another city. My GF traveled there to spend a few days with Mom for the occasion.
Mom’s 9th birthday was just a few days before the Pearl Harbor attack. I asked GF to ask Mom about WWII unless that was a taboo topic. She said it wasn’t and here’s GF’s report to me about what Mom said about living in Miami near the coast as a kid through the war:
Just had a conversation about WWII. Very interesting! I’ve never talked to her about it.
She told me how they had food rations with colored coded coupons. Green for vegetables, red for meat and blue for dairy. Had to make sure the military was fed! Gas was rationed also.
My mom’s parents were the only one in her neighborhood that had a phone cuz her father was in the navy.
She told me at night they had to close all the blinds to keep the house dark and cars had to have their car headlights half painted black…….To keep the streets and communities/neighborhoods dark.
Not to come under attack.
Very interesting!
THANK YOU for prompting this conversation!!!
She definitely remembers the attack on Pearl Harbor.
GF’s father is also 93 and a Miami native. He’s a few months older than his former wife, GF’s Mom. So he was about 9-1/2 when the attack happened.
Dad lives in the same city as Mom and GF will visit him too for a couple days and ask the same questions. I’ll let you know what we all learn.
You gotta be 90+ to have a chance to remember it.
