Twin Tragedies
Note: The following story was part of a project I worked on to look at the differences between 9-11 and Pearl Harbor. The story ran on the front page on Dec. 7, 2001. While looking into this story, I tracked down an amazing story, which ended up running on the front alongside this one: the daughter of the Japanese pilot who led the air raid over Pearl Harbor. She lives in Berkeley. I interviewed her.
By Corey Lyons
Contra Costa Newspapers
Dec. 7, 2001
As black smoke and flames curled into the sky above Pearl Harbor 60 years ago today, America had suffered a devastating blow that President Franklin D. Roosevelt described as "a date which will live in infamy."
In one jarring surprise attack, Dec. 7, 1941, became recognized as America's permanent scar. So when the World Trade Center crumbled and vanished from the Manhattan skyline on Sept. 11, the country struggled to grasp the magnitude of the strikes. Immediately, politicians and journalists compared the terrorist attacks to Pearl Harbor.
But perhaps unlike any other American tragedy -- including the bombing of Pearl Harbor -- the horror of Sept. 11 was consumed immediately and unmistakably.
"We can see it instantly. And it is getting relentlessly reinforced to us," said Stanley Weintraub, a retired professor emeritus at Penn State University who has written extensively about World War II. "I don't think we've ever had that before."
Indeed, Sept. 11 brought horror up close and into sharp focus. The tragedy unfolded on live TV in front of millions of people who had trouble believing their eyes.
With Pearl Harbor, on the other hand, television did not exist to capture the images of flaming battleships. Details of the attack reached the United States in censored radio broadcasts.
The stream of horrifying imagery on Sept. 11 -- including workers jumping to their deaths from the burning trade center towers -- were shown over and over again. Quickly, CNN packaged and titled the devastation -- "America Under Attack" -- a label that became widely used in the media.
Meanwhile, dozens of newspapers nationwide, including the Times, produced extra editions that were delivered hours after the suicide attacks.
Frank Scandale, editor of The Record, a New Jersey daily, scrambled to produce an eight-page section shortly after the towers collapsed. It was the newspaper's first section of its kind since the assassination of President Kennedy, he said.
Thirty thousand copies, he added, "sold like popcorn."
Readers wanted to know why thousands of people were dying in dark piles of smoldering rubble. What happened? Who was responsible? Similarly, national leaders and media executives struggled to grasp the magnitude of the tragedy, which sent a clamor of fear coast to coast. Were more targets planned? Would a nuclear blast follow? Had the country been jolted into a war? Pearl Harbor inevitably surfaced.
"This is the second Pearl Harbor. I don't think I overstate it," Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., told the Associated Press on Sept. 11.
***
On Dec. 7, 1941, a crisp Sunday morning, an armada of Japanese warplanes ripped through a layer of clouds over Pearl Harbor, a U.S. military base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Without a declaration of war, bombs began falling on a neat row of U.S. battleships moored in the bay.
Amid the chaos, a voice crackled over the base radio: "Air raid, Pearl Harbor. This is not a drill." When the bombing ended two hours later, the U.S. Pacific Fleet was crippled. Nearly 2,400 people died, nearly all of them soldiers.
"We were surprised. We really didn't know what was going on that day," said Walnut Creek resident Bernard "Bing" Walenter, a Navy machinist aboard the USS Medusa when the strikes occurred. Walenter, 81, was eating breakfast aboard the Medusa, a repair ship tethered to the USS Curtiss, when explosions rocked the bay.
In the aftermath, he and his shipmates relied on short Navy bulletins for details of the attack, he said. "We didn't have the communication available today," said Walenter, who spent six years in the Navy. "I don't even know if I saw a newspaper for a couple of days after the bombing. "
It would have to be brought aboard," he added, "and nobody would get off the ship for days."
After the strikes, the Navy forwarded a standard three-word message -- "I AM SAFE" --to his parents in Illinois, indicating that he had survived, Walenter said.
The impact of Dec. 7, unlike Sept. 11, was not immediately grasped by Americans. The Japanese had bombed a remote military base thousands of miles off North America. Key details of the attack -- such as the full extent of the damage -- were withheld by the government for months at the least.
"Government statements were sketchy and downplayed the losses. Newsreel footage and photographs were not released for a year or more," said Jeffery A. Smith, author of "War and Press Freedom."
Americans had to imagine the horror. Lena Wilson, 78, who was working as a maid in 1941, was preparing a Sunday meal for a family in Oklahoma on Dec. 7 when a radio update interrupted a religious program.
"We all just sat down and went, 'wheesh,'" she said, wiping her brow. "It was unbelievable."
Nonetheless, she said, it took a full day for the news to sink in, when Roosevelt delivered his "date of infamy" broadcast. "It was a 24-hour delay," said Wilson, a resident at Quail Lodge, a retirement home in Antioch. "But Sept. 11 was immediate. I heard about it 20 seconds after it happened."
***
The Navy seized immediate control of the airwaves after the Pearl Harbor attack. Only minimal bits of information were broadcast to the nation.
"Even before the battle, the Army and Navy had imposed censorship that silenced the news out of Hawaii," said Mike Sweeney, author of "Secrets of Victory," which details press censorship during World War II.
On Dec. 8, the Army and the Federal Communications Commission requested that every radio station along the West Coast shut down at 5 p.m., Sweeney said.
"There was a fear that Pearl Harbor was only the tip of the iceberg and that California may be next," he said. "Radio signals, it was believed, could be used as honing devices that would allow bomb targets."
Stations returned to the air the next morning, with five-minute Pearl Harbor updates available every 30 minutes, Sweeney said.
During the war, the media cooperated with military censorship demands, fearing that Japan could collect valuable information.
"We were very careful to release as little as possible," said Stanley Weintraub, author of "Long Days Journey into War: Pearl Harbor and a World at War Dec. 7, 1941."
"It didn't make sense to have your population totally dismayed. You wanted to fight a war, and it was enough to tell them that some battleships were sunk and a lot of people were killed."
Indeed, the attack united a nation that had been divided about joining World War II. People were angry. They wanted revenge on the Japanese, and that included those living in the United States. Fear and hysteria led to the imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans, who spent more than three years during World War II locked inside internment camps.
Irene Nakano, an 86-year-old Antioch resident, spent most of the war interned in a barbed-wire barrack in Arkansas.
"I didn't think it would ever happen. I mean, we were U.S. citizens," she said.
The arrests of more than 1,200 Middle Eastern immigrants swept up in a nationwide dragnet since Sept. 11, Nakano said, was unfair and discouraging.
Chris Hirano, director of community development for the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California, said the arrests of Middle Eastern men -- most of whom were being held on immigration violations -- show that history can repeat itself.
"Our country has not learned from past lessons," he said. "I don't have the answers. But fear and ignorance are dangerous things. And they are the fundamental ingredients for racism and war hysteria."
The sprawling investigation of immigrants is one example of how fear gripped the country after an attack on U.S. soil that, unlike Pearl Harbor, did not yield a specific enemy.
***
The Sept. 11 attack was an extremely personal one, witnesses and historians said, because it singled out civilians with the intent of maximizing the death toll.
Scandale, editor of The Record and a former assistant managing editor at the Denver Post who covered the Columbine massacre, said no national incident compares to Sept. 11.
"This happened right outside our window," he said. "We're right there. This is a world event. It's unprecedented on American soil."
He recalled looking out his New Jersey office window one afternoon and admiring the sun-splashed twin towers, bathed in a gold glow. Amazing, he had thought. On Sept. 11, Scandale, stunned, watched as smoke poured from the 110-story buildings. Now, nearly three months later, fears linger.
Cities on the East Coast are wired to an unprecedented regional emergency response plan so they can shut down immediately.
"This is the new world order," Scandale said. "This is how we act now. This is how we respond. I'm not sure if we'll ever say, 'This can't possibly happen.' "Hijackers seized four planes and knocked down the towers and attacked the Pentagon. Anything is possible."
By Corey Lyons
Contra Costa Newspapers
Dec. 7, 2001
As black smoke and flames curled into the sky above Pearl Harbor 60 years ago today, America had suffered a devastating blow that President Franklin D. Roosevelt described as "a date which will live in infamy."
In one jarring surprise attack, Dec. 7, 1941, became recognized as America's permanent scar. So when the World Trade Center crumbled and vanished from the Manhattan skyline on Sept. 11, the country struggled to grasp the magnitude of the strikes. Immediately, politicians and journalists compared the terrorist attacks to Pearl Harbor.
But perhaps unlike any other American tragedy -- including the bombing of Pearl Harbor -- the horror of Sept. 11 was consumed immediately and unmistakably.
"We can see it instantly. And it is getting relentlessly reinforced to us," said Stanley Weintraub, a retired professor emeritus at Penn State University who has written extensively about World War II. "I don't think we've ever had that before."
Indeed, Sept. 11 brought horror up close and into sharp focus. The tragedy unfolded on live TV in front of millions of people who had trouble believing their eyes.
With Pearl Harbor, on the other hand, television did not exist to capture the images of flaming battleships. Details of the attack reached the United States in censored radio broadcasts.
The stream of horrifying imagery on Sept. 11 -- including workers jumping to their deaths from the burning trade center towers -- were shown over and over again. Quickly, CNN packaged and titled the devastation -- "America Under Attack" -- a label that became widely used in the media.
Meanwhile, dozens of newspapers nationwide, including the Times, produced extra editions that were delivered hours after the suicide attacks.
Frank Scandale, editor of The Record, a New Jersey daily, scrambled to produce an eight-page section shortly after the towers collapsed. It was the newspaper's first section of its kind since the assassination of President Kennedy, he said.
Thirty thousand copies, he added, "sold like popcorn."
Readers wanted to know why thousands of people were dying in dark piles of smoldering rubble. What happened? Who was responsible? Similarly, national leaders and media executives struggled to grasp the magnitude of the tragedy, which sent a clamor of fear coast to coast. Were more targets planned? Would a nuclear blast follow? Had the country been jolted into a war? Pearl Harbor inevitably surfaced.
"This is the second Pearl Harbor. I don't think I overstate it," Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., told the Associated Press on Sept. 11.
***
On Dec. 7, 1941, a crisp Sunday morning, an armada of Japanese warplanes ripped through a layer of clouds over Pearl Harbor, a U.S. military base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Without a declaration of war, bombs began falling on a neat row of U.S. battleships moored in the bay.
Amid the chaos, a voice crackled over the base radio: "Air raid, Pearl Harbor. This is not a drill." When the bombing ended two hours later, the U.S. Pacific Fleet was crippled. Nearly 2,400 people died, nearly all of them soldiers.
"We were surprised. We really didn't know what was going on that day," said Walnut Creek resident Bernard "Bing" Walenter, a Navy machinist aboard the USS Medusa when the strikes occurred. Walenter, 81, was eating breakfast aboard the Medusa, a repair ship tethered to the USS Curtiss, when explosions rocked the bay.
In the aftermath, he and his shipmates relied on short Navy bulletins for details of the attack, he said. "We didn't have the communication available today," said Walenter, who spent six years in the Navy. "I don't even know if I saw a newspaper for a couple of days after the bombing. "
It would have to be brought aboard," he added, "and nobody would get off the ship for days."
After the strikes, the Navy forwarded a standard three-word message -- "I AM SAFE" --to his parents in Illinois, indicating that he had survived, Walenter said.
The impact of Dec. 7, unlike Sept. 11, was not immediately grasped by Americans. The Japanese had bombed a remote military base thousands of miles off North America. Key details of the attack -- such as the full extent of the damage -- were withheld by the government for months at the least.
"Government statements were sketchy and downplayed the losses. Newsreel footage and photographs were not released for a year or more," said Jeffery A. Smith, author of "War and Press Freedom."
Americans had to imagine the horror. Lena Wilson, 78, who was working as a maid in 1941, was preparing a Sunday meal for a family in Oklahoma on Dec. 7 when a radio update interrupted a religious program.
"We all just sat down and went, 'wheesh,'" she said, wiping her brow. "It was unbelievable."
Nonetheless, she said, it took a full day for the news to sink in, when Roosevelt delivered his "date of infamy" broadcast. "It was a 24-hour delay," said Wilson, a resident at Quail Lodge, a retirement home in Antioch. "But Sept. 11 was immediate. I heard about it 20 seconds after it happened."
***
The Navy seized immediate control of the airwaves after the Pearl Harbor attack. Only minimal bits of information were broadcast to the nation.
"Even before the battle, the Army and Navy had imposed censorship that silenced the news out of Hawaii," said Mike Sweeney, author of "Secrets of Victory," which details press censorship during World War II.
On Dec. 8, the Army and the Federal Communications Commission requested that every radio station along the West Coast shut down at 5 p.m., Sweeney said.
"There was a fear that Pearl Harbor was only the tip of the iceberg and that California may be next," he said. "Radio signals, it was believed, could be used as honing devices that would allow bomb targets."
Stations returned to the air the next morning, with five-minute Pearl Harbor updates available every 30 minutes, Sweeney said.
During the war, the media cooperated with military censorship demands, fearing that Japan could collect valuable information.
"We were very careful to release as little as possible," said Stanley Weintraub, author of "Long Days Journey into War: Pearl Harbor and a World at War Dec. 7, 1941."
"It didn't make sense to have your population totally dismayed. You wanted to fight a war, and it was enough to tell them that some battleships were sunk and a lot of people were killed."
Indeed, the attack united a nation that had been divided about joining World War II. People were angry. They wanted revenge on the Japanese, and that included those living in the United States. Fear and hysteria led to the imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans, who spent more than three years during World War II locked inside internment camps.
Irene Nakano, an 86-year-old Antioch resident, spent most of the war interned in a barbed-wire barrack in Arkansas.
"I didn't think it would ever happen. I mean, we were U.S. citizens," she said.
The arrests of more than 1,200 Middle Eastern immigrants swept up in a nationwide dragnet since Sept. 11, Nakano said, was unfair and discouraging.
Chris Hirano, director of community development for the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California, said the arrests of Middle Eastern men -- most of whom were being held on immigration violations -- show that history can repeat itself.
"Our country has not learned from past lessons," he said. "I don't have the answers. But fear and ignorance are dangerous things. And they are the fundamental ingredients for racism and war hysteria."
The sprawling investigation of immigrants is one example of how fear gripped the country after an attack on U.S. soil that, unlike Pearl Harbor, did not yield a specific enemy.
***
The Sept. 11 attack was an extremely personal one, witnesses and historians said, because it singled out civilians with the intent of maximizing the death toll.
Scandale, editor of The Record and a former assistant managing editor at the Denver Post who covered the Columbine massacre, said no national incident compares to Sept. 11.
"This happened right outside our window," he said. "We're right there. This is a world event. It's unprecedented on American soil."
He recalled looking out his New Jersey office window one afternoon and admiring the sun-splashed twin towers, bathed in a gold glow. Amazing, he had thought. On Sept. 11, Scandale, stunned, watched as smoke poured from the 110-story buildings. Now, nearly three months later, fears linger.
Cities on the East Coast are wired to an unprecedented regional emergency response plan so they can shut down immediately.
"This is the new world order," Scandale said. "This is how we act now. This is how we respond. I'm not sure if we'll ever say, 'This can't possibly happen.' "Hijackers seized four planes and knocked down the towers and attacked the Pentagon. Anything is possible."
posted by Corey at 11:10 AM
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