Yeah, the joke is just that I’m used to the 40s being 60 years ago and it’s weird to think that they are 80 years ago now.
I think many of us sorta stopped grokking the passage of time along about the turn of the century. You all remember “Party like it’s 2000”, and many of us are still doin’ that. At least in our heads. 
My parents have passed but Pearl Harbor was a really big deal. My father signed up to fight on his 17th birthday. He was on the invasion of Japan. He visited me in the early 1990’s when I worked in Tokyo, and he visited Hiroshima. Peers of my generation visit Hiroshima, and take away the horror of atomic weapons. My father “that bomb saved my life.”
When I was a kid in the late 1960’s, I really got into reading books about WW1 & WW2. A machinist, and a member of my father’s small presbyterian church, was an Arizona survivor (IIRC, he had been on a ship that had been sunk at PH that day). I asked him once as maybe a 10 year old what it was like. I just vaguely remember a short, patient with a child, kind of answer along the lines of “it was pretty bad and didn’t think we would get out.”
I don’t even think it’s necessarily an age thing. I’m in my 30s, and my wife and many of our friends the same age say the same thing.
I think it’s just that the Xties were (10-X) years ago was a very convenient shorthand, and really it worked well enough throughout the 90s and 2000s; it wasn’t that bad in the 2010s; and then 2020 messed go everyone’s internal calendars right when we should have been moving on from the shorthand.
It was my paternal grandparent’s 22nd anniversary.
My parents were both born a couple of years after, in 43. My mother was the last child in her family, and most of her siblings were much older (nearest child to her was 10 years older). So, several of my uncles signed up during the war.
My parents were also born after Pearl Harbor Day, and all their older relatives are gone.
When I was in high school, I was given homework to interview two people about their memories of World War II. One of the people I interviewed was my neighbor’s mother, who was in the Philippines at the time. As she was the daughter of an American soldier, she had to hide from the Japanese invaders, as she would have been targeted due to her heritage. She spent the entire war staying hidden in the mountains.
The other person I interviewed was my grandmother. Even 40 years after the war, she still refused to buy anything Japanese, due to what happened on December 7, 1941.
My grandfather was an Army amtrac commander in 1945 and was undergoing training in California in preparation for the invasion of Japan.
In case you aren’t aware, amtrac is a portmanteau of amphibious tractor, which are those tank-like vehicles that you see in old Pacific war films that sail out of the ships and crawl onto the beach. His was one of these.
He wss unapologetically enthusiastic about the use of nuclear weapons to end the war.
Sometimes when a government says ‘we’re doing _____ to prevent ______,’ they’re actually sincere.
No doubt there would have been more American deaths without the bombs. Arguably, there could have been more Japanese deaths, too, particularly if things had progressed to an invasion/conventional bombing of the Japanese islands.
(Not to minimize the suffering of those in or close to the atomic-bomb targeted cities, which of course was horrific.)
My mother is 90 so she was only six when Pearl Harbor happened and she doesn’t remember it very well. My father was seven years older so he was 13 and remembers the excitement in town about it, but also his uncle warning that war could be quite nasty.
It’s not arguably, the firebombing of Japan caused more deaths than the atomic bombing, and the firebombing of Tokyo was worse than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
What is also missing is that the number of people dying in Japanese held countries would have been much worse as well.
My surviving uncle is my dad’s youngest brother (the youngest of three brothers, five siblings). He was born on December 3rd 1941. His middle name comes from my great uncle’s (Captain Chaplain Thomas Leroy Kirkpatrick) middle name, who was the first Navy chaplain to be killed in WWII, aboard USS Arizona, December 7th 1941.
And my own stepdaughter wouldn’t have been born, and wouldn’t be performing much-needed oncology social work today.
Her maternal grandmother was the child of Korean employees of the Japanese-run railway, and spent most of her childhood in local orphanages while they were fulfilling their obligations to the Emperor. As we know, Japan planned to take every grain of rice back home in advance of the Americans’ invasion, leaving millions of Koreans to starve.
My stepdaughter’s paternal grandfather joined the US Army to escape the Great Depression’s doubly-harsh conditions in Puerto Rico, and was sent to the Philippines. He survived the Bataan Death March, which would only have delayed the inevitable had the Bomb not been dropped; since the Japanese also planned on killing all POWs not held on their Home Islands as they withdrew to face the invasion.
(“A story I’ve told before” warning) when Grandma was dying in a Honolulu hospital in 2005, my stepdaughter went to sit with her. She remained delirious most of the time, and relived some of the horrors of the war; going back in time to when she’d witnessed a Korean boy emasculated by Japanese bayonets. But when a Japanese-American woman was put in the bed next to her she roared back to life. “Get this Japanese whore out of here!”
My stepdad was born in September of 1933. I so happen to be on a visit with him and my mom and we talked about it last night. He has always been a follower of the news and his earliest memories are of the war in Europe and Edward R Murrow reporting from London. His recollection is the news coming over the radio but not understanding the full implications. He lived in the Chicago area at the time. He was the oldest sibling.
Does the general public even acknowledge “Pearl Harbor Day” anymore? When the day arrives, I never hear it mentioned on the news.
It certainly was this year.
Like the D-Day observances, usually the coverage is often about how few people are left who have first-hand adult memories…
IOW, not so different from the USS Maine a couple wars previously.
Right now it’s about 2 months to the 127th anniversary of that event. Damned good be you won’t hear anyone speaking about it in somber tones in person or on the news. And eyewitness accounts are just not possible.
History is like that as it recedes into the past. We’re each like that too on our individual journeys to become first remembered history then forgotten history. It would be amazing and weird if that process happened in any other way.
♫ And the band plays Waltzing Matilda
And the old men still answer to the call
But year after year their numbers get fewer
Some day no one will march there at all ♫
I spoke with my dad about it yesterday. He was born in 1933, and had turned 8 a few weeks before Pearl Harbor.
His recollection is listening to Roosevelt’s “date which will live in infamy” speech on the radio with his parents. He was young enough that he didn’t really understand what war meant, but he remembers his father talking about how terrible all of this was.
Yes, that makes a lot of sense.
(I continue to enjoy the posts in this thread. I hope it continues up to that 85th anniversary and beyond.)