Before I visited Pearl Harbor during a trip to Honolulu a year and a half ago most of my mental pictures of that place had been created by the World War II movies I'd seen, such as Tora! Tora! Tora!,
| ...which, by the way, if you haven't seen it you should, as this 1970 film is the best Pearl Harbor attack film of them all (at least according to this critic), |  |
 | ...and from the images of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in these two World War II books that were on our bookshelf when I was growing up, |
And though some of the images in those books used to scare the bejeepers out of me,
...I not only couldn't resist continuing to pull them off the shelf on a regular basis, but when I grew up and had a home and bookshelf of my own I asked my parents if I could take them,
 | ...with the result that they ended up on my bookshelf and scared the bejeepers out of my kids. |
It must have been all those years of looking at those fear-provoking pictures of World War II that caused me to wonder from time to time: did the leaders of Japan back then really believe their country would get away with bombing Pearl Harbor?
| Did it occur to none of them that the United States would come back to retaliate with a vengeance? |  |
...though even if it had, who among them who could have imagined what the finale of that vengeance would be?
But today when I think of Pearl Harbor, I recall the images of that memorial as it looked when I saw it in the spring of 2015,
| ...crowded with visitors from all over the world, |  |
 | ...including many Japanese, |
| ...who had come to pay their respects and enjoy the peaceful beauty of this place. |  |
And I think of what a different day today will be at Pearl Harbor from that terrible day 75 years ago.
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