ANCHORAGE DAILY PLANET
Today we pause to remember the “Day of Infamy” that plunged this nation into war.
Japan, early on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, without warning attacked the United States at the American Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. President Franklin D. Roosevelt the next day stood before Congress and described Dec. 7, 1941, as “a date which will live in infamy.” Across history, the attack has.
Veterans of that battle and the others that followed are elderly men nowadays, their numbers fading. But the memory of their sacrifice should forever be a torch for future generations. These warriors, after all, paid with blood, sweat and tears for our freedom.
The Japanese attack on that day was fierce. Carrier-based warplanes sank five battleships, severely damaged three others anchored alongside, crippled or sank other ships of the U.S. fleet, and destroyed much of the nation’s Hawaii-based combat airplanes. The attack left 2,403 military and civilians dead – 1,177 from the USS Arizona alone.
Two Army Air Corps fighter planes got into the air to engage the Japanese attackers. One of those was flown by Ken Taylor, who survived several more combat missions during the war and who lived in Anchorage until his death in 2006.
Taylor accounted for four Japanese dive bombers on Dec. 7 and was injured. After his retirement from a long career of active Air Force service, Taylor headed the Alaska Air National Guard, a brigadier general whose wartime heroism is still hailed.
Four years later, World War II ended with victory over the Axis forces of Germany, Italy and Japan after bloody fighting in the North and South Pacific, in North Africa, in Europe, China, Burma and India. In the rebuilding that followed, nations once our enemies became our friends, allies and trade partners.
At Pearl Harbor, the attack of more than seven decades ago is remembered at the USS Arizona Memorial, erected over the sunken remains of one of the battleships shattered in those opening moments of America’s entry into World War II.
On this day, we salute the gallant men and women who fought for our freedom, a job that seemingly has no end.
