Only a few are left now who were alive that fateful day 80 years ago. Maybe that’s why we seem to have forgotten the lessons of that time – it certainly isn’t because they didn’t tell us. Tom Brokaw called them ‘the greatest generation’ and they have full right to that title.
The US wanted no real part of the war. Sure, we aided Britain and embargoed Japan – but Americans had no stomach for sending their boys to fight another bloody war in Europe or anywhere else. World War I had been the ‘war to end all wars’ – and Europeans were again at each other’s throats in less than twenty years. America hadn’t born the worst of that first World War but she had no intention of having a second helping.
That changed at 7:55 am on December 7th, 1941 as Japanese planes commenced their attack on Pearl Harbor. That surprise attack on a peaceful Sunday morning against a nation that didn’t want to go to war changed everything. If the Japanese hoped the Americans would lose their taste for battle after such a loss, they were sorely disappointed. America was not only in the war, she would now stop at nothing to win it.
It would take almost four years before the Japanese surrender. Countless lives were lost. Many sons went to war never to return. But America never wavered as she brought her full industrial and military might to bear first on the Germans, then the Japanese.
But America and her allies weren’t fighting over a bloody nose or despicable military tactics. They were fighting literally to save the world. Fascism from the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterparte that then ruled Germany and the Fasci di Combattimento of Italy threatened freedom on a global scale.
Today, America has children running in her streets claiming to oppose fascism by imposing it. Mandates of what to wear and what to be injected with have been issued in her states and even in her capital. Everything the greatest generation fought against seems to have made itself at home in the US of A.
In 1941, the world was not assured a victory – not even with America coming into the war. Even for all her vast industrial, financial, military and political might, America could not fight a war unscathed. Wars need funds but they are fought be men. Men who leave homes and families to bleed and die on foreign shores. Even if they had known on December 8, 1941 that the war President Roosevelt was calling for Congress to declare would definitely be won, every American knew it would only be won at a high price, paid in blood.
But America went to war anyway, knowing the cost, to once again take up the battle for freedom.
Those that fought that war are passing into history now. It is up to us to make sure we never forget and that when our children grow out of their infatuation with socialism, that they, too, never forget. We have a lot of work to do – but that’s only a small part of the price we pay for freedom.
Never forget.
