Remember Pearl Harbor

Hard to believe it’s been 75 years since that Sunday the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, even harder to believe I can vividly recall something that happened 75 years ago.

There aren’t that many of us who actually “remember Pearl Harbor,” as the war’s first popular song urged. The principals are long gone — Franklin D. Roosevelt, George Marshall, Emperor Hirohito and the architect of the attack, the Harvard-educated American-admirer Admiral Yamamoto. Only about 600,000 of the 16 million Americans who served in the war survive. 

Soon, only the little kids who were around then will remember.

I was 8. We lived in a two-family house at 416 75th St. in North Bergen, N.J., and my grandparents, as was often the case in those days, had a home on the same street, at 431. It was a neighborhood of many second- and third-generation German-Americans who attended the Dutch Reformed Church on Palisade Avenue. In fact, the talk of the neighborhood just before that Sunday was the FBI’s questioning of the owner of the German “pork store” up on Bergenline Avenue. It turned out, “he was only delivering baloney to the bund,” according to my father. The German-American Bund was a pro-Nazi boosters’ club funded by Hitler’s Germany.

That Sunday, like every Sunday, we were at my grandparents’ for a midday dinner. By early afternoon, my grandfather, my father, my brother and I were in the front room, as the living room was designated, listening to a football game between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers while my mother, grandmother and an aunt were in the kitchen, doing the dishes.

I was standing near the big Philco radio when the game was interrupted by a news bulletin. According to The New York Daily News, this is what we heard:

“We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this important bulletin from the United Press. Flash, Washington — the White House announces Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Stay tuned to WOR for further developments, which will be broadcast as received.” 

I can’t remember what they said, but the grownups were quite agitated, so I went to the kitchen to inform the ladies.

“The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor,” I announced and then asked, “What’s Pearl Harbor?” 

I was aware there was a war going on before the attack, but it was the war in Europe, which we learned about mostly from the dramatic radio reports by Edward R. Murrow as he described the bombs falling on London. 

And there were air raid drills at the Robert Fulton elementary school, even before Pearl Harbor. We’d stand four or five abreast in an inner hallway, away from classroom windows. During one of the drills, the boy next to me asked, “Who are you for, the Russians or the Finns?” This referred to the almost-forgotten Russian attack on its small neighbor in 1939-40, and the only answer was, of course, “the Finns.” 

The war would dominate our young lives for the next four years. Everyone had friends and family in the Army, Navy or Marines, and some people we knew had suffered losses.

The dinner table conversation was often about the war — the blue stars hanging in windows, signifying one or more sons in the service, or sometimes the gold star, memorializing a loss. 

There was talk about rationing, about stamps or tokens to buy some foods and windshield stickers for gasoline, the shortages of necessities and luxuries, the blackouts. One night, an air raid warden knocked on the door of our darkened living room to tell my father a bit of light could be seen under one of our black window shades.

Every kid seemed able to recognize all the Allied and enemy fighter planes and bombers and identify army units by the patches sewn on the soldiers’ sleeves. The war dominated the radio shows we heard as well as the movies, and not only the newsreels. We bought defense stamps, later called war stamps, for 25 cents until we filled a book worth $18.75, enough to buy a $25 war bond, redeemable in 10 years. And there’s a special memory:

It was only a short walk down our street to the Hudson Boulevard, where you could see the huge, French luxury liner Normandie being converted into a troop ship on the New York side of the river. Then there was a fire, started by a welder’s spark, and the world’s largest ocean liner was turned on its side in the Hudson River mud. 

In the coming years, we would learn many new names of heretofore obscure places in the world where people a bit older than us were fighting the Germans and the Japanese — Wake Island, Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, El Alamein, the Kasserine Pass, Anzio, Bastogne. And we’d always remember them, the places and the people — and Pearl Harbor. 

 Simsbury, Conn.,  resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. 

 Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.