January 2011

I am of the generation that actually can remember Pearl Harbor (I was 19 when the radio flashed the news), and the strangest thing about its 50th anniversary is that it came so fast. I seem to have mislaid a half-century somewhere. Readers over 60 will understand the feeling.

There are, however, reflections of a more universal character that the moment provokes. For both the United States and Japan, that tragic Sunday was a pivot point in their long, strange, up-and-down relationship. By the end of the day, the United States had suffered its worst military defeat, and among the casualties was the sacred national faith that the oceans offered eternal protection from attack. But the state of shock induced by Pearl Harbor quickly wore off, and three years and eight months later, the tables were turned when ruined Japan surrendered to American occupation and rule. It was Japan’s people who confronted a stunning moment of reversal and revelation. Up to then, they had never lost a war, either.

You may think they are inclined to make too much of New York, the lights of Manhattan, the extent of the prairies and the beauty of Niagara.” “They” are Americans, and I am in London’s Imperial War Museum, reading a pamphlet telling Britons how to cope with meeting one of us. “If you allow yourself to be irritated by their talk it will mean that you cannot find things to equal them in Britain. True, we have not got a Woolworth Building, but then neither has America got a thousand-year-old Tower of London.…” The flyer offers a few more cautionary notes—“Don’t talk about Chicago gangsters as if they represented 90% of the population of America”—and then concludes, “Most important of all, remember that every time you lose your temper with an American or refuse to understand him, you are fighting Hitler’s battles for him.”

Great Britain has a notably energetic tourist agency: British Tourist Authority, 40 West Fifty-seventh Street, New York, NY 10019-4001/Tel: 212-581-4700. The Cabinet War Rooms, a few hundred feet away from the Houses of Parliament, are open all year round; so, too, is Cliveden, which is a short train ride out of London in Taplow (01-628-668561).

There was no light. Most of the soldiers in the boats couldn’t see anything, but they knew they must be close because the wind offshore brought the smell of charcoal smoke and dry grass. The first assault troops landed sometime after eight bells. The only sounds they heard were the metallic jingle of their gear and the crunch of their boots on the wet beach. Two shore-based searchlights snapped open to look for aircraft. It took a moment for the enemy to realize that danger was coming at them not from the sky but from the sea. As coastal batteries opened fire, men on the flagship Augusta heard a voice over the loudspeaker call out, “Play ball!”

The big guns of the United States Western Naval Task Force tore apart the dark sky, and the main landing force prepared to go ashore at Fedala, near Casablanca. The landing on North Africa was under way. On November 8, 1942, 11 months after Pearl Harbor, American military forces had finally crossed the Atlantic to seek out the German army and fight it.

On April 6, 1942, I joined the 40th Squadron of the newly formed 35th Fighter Group then being assembled at Bankstown, New South Wales, Australia, a suburb of Sydney. The 40th was flying training missions in P-39s, for which I for one was duly thankful, since I had only four hours of flying time in the plane we were expecting to fly in combat and I had never fired the guns.

From Bankstown, we were soon sent to Townsville, Queensland, on the northeast coast of Australia. We traveled by train, which at one point had to back up for fifty miles because another train was coming from the north on the same track and we were nearest the only place where there was a parallel track to allow it to pass.

By John Lukacs; Ticknor & Fields; 288 pages; $10.95.

“It is not only historically wrong but dangerous to see Hitler and Hitlerism as no more than a strange parenthesis in the history of the twentieth century,” John Lukacs writes toward the beginning of The Duel, and it is not the least of this fascinating book’s virtues that it manages to re-create a world that viewed Hitlerism as nothing less than the future itself, come to claim its scepter from the played-out Western democracies.

Winston Churchill saw the true nature of that future more clearly than most and warned England against it, and for his pains he was despised as a saber rattler. But at last he came into power, on the same day that Hitler threw his legions into France and Belgium. The duel of the title is the duel between the two men.

My wife and I visited Corregidor last December. Some 50 other tourists boarded the big, enclosed hydrofoil with us for the trip across Manila Bay. Perhaps half our fellow passengers were Filipinos, a quarter Americans and Europeans, and the rest Japanese. We all shared our box lunches amicably enough—the chicken-salad sandwiches entombed in Styrofoam, washed down with a warm orange soda called Zesto—and we all listened together in the same pained silence as loudspeakers blared “A Holly, Jolly Christmas” and “Feliz Navidad” over and over again. (The Christmas season begins in late October in the Philippines and may be celebrated there more relentlessly than anywhere else on Earth.)

And everyone was elaborately polite to everyone else, the Japanese bowing and smiling as they maneuvered to get better snapshots of the little island, which grew larger as we hummed toward it, and of the jagged profile of the Bataan Peninsula, just off to its right. Clearly, we all were determined that there be no hard feelings on this excursion into our common history.

The best of enemies

The Cold War, which has defined the shape of the world for anybody younger than fifty-five, was in fact an anomaly. From the earliest years of our Republic, Americans and Russians viewed each other with something approaching amity. Now that the order established by the Second World War has so suddenly and spectacularly dissolved, John Lukacs looks at the two-hundred-year relationship between the two greatest powers on earth, with an eye to finding what seeds of the past may blossom in the future.

The multiculturalism flap

The fiercest struggle going on in education just now came boiling up with a suddenness that took most people wholly by surprise. The question is, simply, what we should teach our children about their past, and in a calm, judicious, but very tough-minded interview, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., explains why a great deal may be at stake.

Plus…

I have virtually memorized key elements of “The Media and the Military” (July/August). This piece could not be more timely.