Day of Infamy

Last Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, came and went barely noticed and with little commemoration. Who, back in the 1940s, would ever have believed that could happen.

Nothing is more revealing of the transience of historic events or more illustrative of the futility of war than the passing of the Day of Infamy with hardly a mention in the media.

The Dec. 7, 1941, sneak attack by the Japanese on the American base at Pearl Harbor, with a tremendous loss of life, stunned the nation. Furious and impassioned, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed war on Japan the following day and declared that the perfidy of that Sunday would "live in infamy" forevermore.

Three days later we also declared war on Germany and Italy, and the United States would never be the same. Neither would I.

Out of a total population of 134 million, over 16 million men and women served in the armed forces while more millions of women and older men were mobilized in the prodigious military equipment and armament race that ensued. The U.S. became the arsenal of democracy for the allied forces.

On a personal level, I served some 43 months in the army and it was a most edifying experience. Fortunately, I did not see any combat. I had never touched a gun until my army basic training, and lethal weapons still repel me. The obstacle course under live fire was scary enough for me.

I discovered that it's possible to come from the big city and still be provincial. This 22 year old kid from the Lower East Side who had never been away from home learned a lot — from the first day on!

I loved hot cereal and my mother seasoned it with salt. At the breakfast table in boot camp the guy beside me asked me to pass the sugar. I watched as he poured sugar on his hot cereal, and then in amazement as everybody at the table followed suit. I was outnumbered ten to one in my preference, and that was but the first of many such experiences revealing my own insularity.

Among the less momentous things I learned in the army was how to shoot dice. It happened that I also was acting Jewish chaplain at a new camp we set up in the wilds of Oregon, and often my constituency had to drag me away from a crap game to conduct Friday night services!

Smitten by my first glimpse of sunny Los Angeles while in the service, I hatched the thought of someday returning to this enchanting place which offered stark contrast to the seamy tenements from whence I came.

The military was segregated then as no blacks served with whites, although both colors bled red on the same battlefields.

Movies of that period depicted the Japanese and the Germans as the incarnate of evil. Our allies then were the Russians, and without them along with their tremendous suffering and casualties, the war in Europe would have gone on beyond 1945 for sure.

Dropping the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, brought Japan to her knees and ended the bloody conflict some 44 months after Pearl Harbor. For most of us then it was a surprise and sudden ending, gratefully received, and with little thought of the vast implications of nuclear power.

One now needs a scorecard to tell our "enemies" from our "friends." The then-hated Germans are now among our staunchest allies in Europe — united against the common foe, Russia.

Japan and Germany, which both lay in ruins, totally beaten in 1945, are now the premier economic powers of the world.

The U.S. trade deficits are largely attributable to Japanese and German imports which are better and cheaper than the vaunted American products. Their cars and electronic apparatus are eagerly bought by American consumers and their technological prowess equals or exceeds our own.

Our budget deficits require the U.S. to borrow from abroad, and the Japanese and Germans use their excess trade dollars to buy our government bonds. Should they back away our interest rates would have to keep rising to attract their investment. Thus, from our lofty post-War perch as creditors of the World, we have now become the largest debtor nation of all.

The consequences of this radical change have yet to be fully felt.

Our once-proud American dollar keeps falling in value against the Japanese yen and the German mark. Japanese and other foreign investors are gobbling up our choicest real estate and finest corporations at bargain prices. Last year, West Germany led the world in exports, ahead of us for the first time in the postwar era.

Like it or not, our interest rates, our rents, the costs of our goods and value of our real property, and the prices of our stocks and bonds, are greatly influenced by foreign investors. Among the world's largest banks, only one from the United States (Citibank of New York) ranked in the top 25, and the seven largest are all Japanese.

The generous post-War financial aid (Marshall Plan) we rendered to our stricken foes helped lift them from the depths to these positions of renewed strength and international economic power. And our insistence that Japan have neither army nor navy (with the U.S. as military protector) certainly helped their economic revival. There must be some lesson in all this!

Indeed, what Japan and Germany couldn't do by force of arms they have thus accomplished by economic means in a scant four decades. Ironically, and without the loss of a single life, the vanquished are now the victors in the world financial arena.

By contrast, the over-one-million American casualties of World War II are sad reminders of the futility of war as we as a nation embrace our erstwhile foes.

(I must confess that my own memories of the terrible loss of my only brother in that useless conflict and the horrors of genocide inflicted on my people in the Holocaust preclude my ever viewing Germany with equanimity.)

For me, December 7, 1941, was a fateful date never to be forgotten, a turning point in my life. It brought a loss of innocence, a passage from the unsophisticated and provincial into the real and harsh world of conflict and wariness.

But, the day which Franklin Delano Roosevelt solemnly proclaimed would "live in infamy," didn't.

What a poor collective memory we have.