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| 1 | You bet! We really need heroes! When Loren said those words, my mind flashed back to 1941, to the days ahead of the disastrous “Day of Infamy!” and the shock of it, and all the mind-numbing days that followed… and what they brought us. |
| 2 | In the days prior to Pearl Harbor, Bob Thomlinson, a lieutenant in the Navy Reserve, had assured me the Japanese Navy “couldn’t last ten minutes” if it went to war with the United States. Similarly, Liberty Magazine had just published an issue devoted to “Impregnable Pearl Harbor.” What did the United States have to fear? |
| 3 | I was in the announce booth for the morning shift at KGW Radio and had just settled back to listen to a radio drama (Chekov’s, “The Cherry Orchard” as I recall) when the sound was wiped out and a screaming announcer from the network came on with, “The Japanese are bombing Pearl Harbor!” |
| 4 | My brother was on the USS California and we knew it was at Pearl. My first thought was about him, but that soon ended when we had to answer telephone calls to the studio in a day that did not end for me until midnight. |
| 5 | “We regret to inform you that your son, Marshall A. Washburn, is missing in action and presumed dead!” |
| 6 | Several days later, that was the telegram my mother received, and I went home to my parents for Christmas. My mother was the postmaster at Carlotta, California. At noon, she would bring our mail home and hand it to my father who would sort through the Christmas cards, and then he would come across a card or letter of condolence. The sound of your father sobbing while he reads the mail… is a sound that lingers… and won’t go away. |
| 7 | “Within hours of the Hawaii attack, as the ocean dawn raced across the blue Pacific, Japanese war planes roared in from the sea to bomb three other American targets: Guam, Wake, and Clark Airfield in the Central Philippines. |
| 8 | “Japanese bombers also struck the British colony of Hong Kong that day, already December 8 in the Eastern Hemisphere. They mounted their biggest attack against the northern coast of the British colony of Malaya. An army that eventually numbered 200,000 was put ashore beginning a 350-mile push through the jungles to ‘impregnable’ Singapore, the Royal Navy stronghold at the tip of the Malay Peninsula. |
| 9 | “In a furious attack on December 10, dozens of high-level and torpedo bombers fatally wounded two giant ships, the British Prince of Wales and Repulse, sending them to the bottom of the South China Sea along with about 600 of their 3,000 crew members. This shocking loss left the British-American allies with no major naval power anywhere in the region. |
| 10 | “Hong Kong’s 11,000 British and Canadian defenders capitulated on Christmas Day to the Japanese who had cut off the isolated colony’s water supply.” And so the reports continue in the Associated Press “World War II, A 50th Anniversary History.” |
| 11 | Where were the heroes? “Dead, missing in action, wounded, or prisoners of war” would be their notations on the rosters. |
| 12 | Again, on the Day of Infamy, Wake Island’s 400 marines scrambled from their breakfasts to their baffle stations after receiving a warning by radio from Hawaii. The war arrived five hours later in the first of daily air attacks the men would have to endure for the next two weeks. Two days before Christmas the island had to surrender. The surviving Americans, the Associated Press tells us, were rounded up, stripped and bound, and left sitting on the airstrip, in the open without food, for two days. It was the beginning of long years of brutality in Japanese captivity. |
| 13 | Where were the heroes? “Dead, missing in action, wounded, or prisoners of war.” It seemed the River Styx was overflowing its banks, engulfing more and more of us every day. Would there soon be none to mourn? |
| 14 | My own circumstances had changed. One day in April of 1942, 1 found myself standing in a “chow line,” aluminum mess-kit in hand, shuffling forward toward the mess tent for our noon meal. Propped against the lower wall was a newspaper rack. There emblazoned across the front page of the paper, was the most incredible headline we’d seen up to that date: U S BOMBERS STRIKE TOKYO! |
| 15 | No! Really! You mean after all this time, we can finally hear something good? Day after day of tragedy and death had given us no cause to “lift up our hearts.” But here! At last! There must be a God in Heaven if we could, at long last, hear a word of cheer. |
| 16 | The Associated Press, cited above, says:The Doolittle raid inflicted no major damage on Japan. A later Naval War College study could find “no strategical reason” for the attack. But it stirred American morale and put the Japanese people on notice that their cities were in reach of U. S. air power. |
| 17 | I wonder if the person who wrote that report had actually lived through those days. If he had, he’d know we had finally found what we had needed - WE NEEDED HEROES!
Nominated and Edited by Jan Anderson, Writing Instructor
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