The US Naval Academy Glee Club singing Eternal Father aboard the USS Arizona Memorial. The dastardly sneak attack on Pearl Harbor killed 2,402 American servicemen and wounded an additional 1247. About one hundred civilians were killed or wounded.
For most Americans living today the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, seems like ancient history. It does not seem like that to me. As I was growing up in the Sixties I was surrounded by adults who recalled Pearl Harbor. My father, who was 8 years old at the time of the attack, remembered the long lines the next morning in our small town of men waiting outside of the recruiting offices of the Army and Navy to join up. He also conveyed to me the shock of a nation one moment at peace, and the next morning at war. Until September 11, 2001, I really didn’t fully comprehend what my father was talking about.Â
It is important to recall Pearl Harbor to remember that the safety and security we enjoy can be wrenched from us so easily if we are not vigilant, and also to recall the Americans who died that day. May they now be enjoying the Beatific Vision.
I remember watching a History Channel documentary on Pearl Harbor. And a Marine bugler on one of the battleships said, “I was a nineteen year old boy at the beginning of that day. But I became a nineteen year old man before that day ended.”