A Day That Will Live in Memory

As a defining event in American history, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 50 years ago this morning was short and surgical, only two hours long. But it changed the world forever and unified Americans as nothing since has managed to do.

The growing edginess in Japanese-American relations gives Pearl Harbor a sensitivity it hasn’t had in years. So it’s well to look back to see where we are now, and this weekend the best rear-view mirror is television.

TV, of course, missed Pearl Harbor, but you’d hardly know it. Graphic footage--some of it familiar, much of it not--and the vivid memories of participants and survivors on both sides of the war enliven two TV specials this weekend: CBS’ “Remember Pearl Harbor” at 8 tonight on Channels 2 and 8, and CNN’s “Pearl Harbor: 50 Years After” at 6 p.m. Sunday.

TV will also be at the USS Arizona Memorial today reporting on anniversary ceremonies (including a two-hour live telecast from Honolulu by CNN beginning at 9 a.m.).

Armchair military historians and people who think they know about Pearl Harbor will find their memories jogged by the visual material and their feelings tested by the personal commentary in the CBS and CNN documentaries. For young viewers, the multiple eyewitness views, in what may be one of the last times in history that we can hear these stories from the men and women who were there, is a great emotional education.

The most disturbing reminder is the wretched point made particularly vivid on the CNN show Sunday night that “the war, for both sides, was portrayed as a race war.” Racial stereotypes abound. U.S. newspaper headlines scream “Jap Gangsters,” and on the radio and in the movies and cartoons of the time, the enemy is “near-sighted and buck-toothed” or “a pagan little yellow-belly.”

As one commentator puts it, “We didn’t even do that with Germany. At least we separated the Germans from the Nazis.”

The CBS and CNN programs use identical naval and air battle footage--and in a few cases the same survivors appear on both shows--but the focus is sufficiently different to create a kind of “Rashomon”-look at Pearl Harbor.

Both programs effectively employ the still photo and voice-over technique used on the PBS “Civil War” series, with prominent American actors doing the off-screen readings on the CBS show. Tonight, almost immediately, we hear the words written home by a U.S. airman (as read by Dustin Hoffman): “Dear Bea. If and when you receive this letter, I will have been shipped home in a basket. I can truthfully say I like you more than any one person I’ve ever known.”

Later on, we learn, this airman, Lt. John Danes, 21, was killed as he flew over Battleship Row--by Americans who mistook him for the enemy.

Because it was produced in cooperation with the Tokyo Broadcasting System, “Remember Pearl Harbor” also features vignettes and memories from the Japanese.

Tadeo Yoshikawsa, the young Japanese naval consultant who brazenly spied on Pearl Harbor in the months before Dec. 7 and dispatched details of the U.S. ships in the harbor to Admiral Yamamoto, is found, sick and forgotten, in a Japanese nursing home.

“Yeah, I’m the main culprit,” he says through translation. “I went to Hawaii when I was 29. I’m 80 years old now and I’m still proud of myself for doing such a good job. I did it for Japan and I’m proud I was a spy.”

As in any war, Americans at home didn’t get the full truth. One of the most persuasive figures on the CBS special is Pearl Harbor author Thurston Clarke.

“When people remember Pearl Harbor,” he says, “they don’t think of the carnage. That’s because the photographs at the time were sanitized. So they didn’t see the bodies lined up on Ford Island in front of the officers’ bungalow, the blood soaking the grass, their limbs hanging from the branches of the banyan tree overhead.”

Most people have forgotten about the abuse piled on the men who commanded Pearl Harbor. “Remember Pearl Harbor” hosts Charles Kuralt and Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf almost make fun of the two ill-fated commanders, Adm. Husband E. Kimmel and Gen. Walter C. Short, for their ineptitude in ignoring warning signs.

But the CNN special, hosted by anchor Bob Cain, asserts the opposite view. Kimmel’s two sons and the admiral’s former aide claim that the commanders were the fall guys for an administration that needed to blame somebody. Kimmel and Short lived in ignominy the rest of their lives.

The CNN broadcast chronicles the chilling effects of the U.S. internment of Japanese-Americans into relocation camps, including “horse stalls, barns and race tracks.” The special also draws parallels between the “never relax” paranoia of Pearl Harbor and the Cold War and Star Wars.

Of all the material on the two specials, the most controversial segments explore the conspiracy theory. That theory, which still haunts Americans today and stems from the fact that our intelligence had broken Japan’s secret code, holds that President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill knew the attack was coming and did nothing to stop it in order to get the United States into the war. CNN’s “50 Years After” perspective spends the most time on this subject, and Roosevelt is essentially absolved.

* Other programming today includes “Sacrifice at Pearl Harbor” (2:30 p.m., A&E;); “Pearl Harbor” (5:30 p.m., KABC Channel 7); “Pearl Harbor Attack” (6 p.m., Discovery Channel); “Remembering Pearl Harbor” (7 p.m., KCAL Channel 9).