TV Reviews : A Sober Reflection on ‘Pearl Harbor’

“Pearl Harbor--Surprise and Remembrance” may be airing on Veteran’s Day (tonight at 9 on KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15, and at 8 on KVCR Channel 24), and a few weeks shy of the 50th anniversary of Japan’s December 7, 1941, surprise attack on U.S. naval forces in Hawaii, but this engrossing entry in “The American Experience” series is no cause for patriotic nostalgia.

Pieced together from countless film fragments (including John Ford’s strange, ultra-realistic “December 7”) by producers Lance Bird, Tom Johnson and John Crowley, it is a sober document encompassing the sorry realities of two nations almost fated for conflict with one another.

There is no more pressing point made here than the fact that Japan’s war with the U.S., Britain, France, the Netherlands and Australia was primarily over natural resources, especially oil. Japan’s Sunday morning blitz on the heart of the U.S. naval fleet wasn’t a prelude to an invasion of the American mainland (remember Spielberg’s “1941”?), but a surgical strike to cut off any resistance to the ultimate Japanese goal: The rich resources of the Dutch East Indies.

The United States simply didn’t take Japan seriously, and, as the film shows, our naive view of a remote island people led us to ignore Japan’s tremendous military and industrial leaps in the 1930s. It was one of several complex causes for U.S. unpreparedness that “Surprise and Remembrance” tracks like a good detective yarn.