Thoughts On December 7th

    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.