Good point, CBT. From last year:

A grateful nation remembers a "date which will live in infamy".

Sailors in a motor launch rescue a survivor from the water alongside the sunken USS West Virginia (BB-48) during or shortly after the Japanese air raid on Pearl Harbor. USS Tennessee (BB-43) is inboard of the sunken battleship. Source: U.S. Navy

My father was one of 16 million that served in the miltary during the war.He was a Navy man..on a mine sweeper in the Pacific.My father & two of my uncles were lucky..they survived without being wounded.

303,649 lost their lives & 670,846 were wounded.

We should never forget.

Pearl Harbor was a monumental tragedy for America.

Pearl Harbor was the Deadliest single attack. That other one was substanitally less as a percentage of our population.

US pop in 1941 was a little over 130,000,000. It was nearly 300,000,000 on 9-11.

Of course neither one of these was particularly significant compared to what we did to ourselves at Gettysburg with about 50,000 dead in three days.

We are much better at killing ourselves than those other guys, it seems. But like you point out, the press won't help us teach the important lessons of human history.

CBT, I am with you on this one. My father turned 16 on Oct. 12,1941. A week later he lied about his age and enlisted in the Navy. He was in boot camp in Great Lakes Michigan when Pearl was attacked. In early 1945 he was discharged as a Chief Petty Officer at age 19. While he was on a ship that was sunk off the Italian coast his only injury came from being attacked by a wild hog in Panama where he was serving on a gate vessel. He was blessed above many others.

Chad, my father, Gerwood Van Guilder, fought in Europe, and was wounded and captured during the early stages of the Battle of the Bulge. His captivity very nearly killed him. He dropped more than 60 pounds from a starting weight of 160 and carried the scars of lice infestation on his legs for the remainder of his days.

As the Russian Army advanced westward, German guards began to move prisoners toward the British and American lines to avoid falling into Russian hands themselves. My father was among a group of Allied prisoners who were left in the custody of the mayor of a small German village as their guards fled the Russians. He survived, barely, but many were not so fortunate (see Malmedy, et al).

The scars unseen haunted him all his life. The widespread ignorance of the sacrifices this country's veterans made in World War II is a national disgrace.

Larry Van Guilder

My g'father was declared 4-F, so my he, my g'mother and my father moved to East Tennessee where my g'father was a carpenter who built dorms and homes for The Secret City, so other folks could build the atomic bomb.

My maternal great g'father and one of my great uncles helped build the barracks for another of the most embarrassing things the American government has ever done -- the Japanese American concentration camps.

I didn't learn about the concentration camp barracks until about four years ago when I was contracted to do research for a children's book on the camps that were in Arkansas. I also helped with curriculum for k-12 students in Arkansas regarding the camps. The irony of how much what we had done 60 years earlier related to what Americans have done to Muslims and folks with Middle Eastern heritage in the last few years wasn't escaped by the high school students in the trial run of the curriculum.

The book I researched was, "Under One Flag: A Year at Rohwer" for August House. It was a finalist for the 2006 Historic Preservation Book Prize from the Center for Historic Preservation at The University of Mary Washington. More on the book here:

(link...)

Pam Strickland

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." ~Kurt Vonnegut