Pearl Harbor’s Infamy Is Echoed by 9-11

Franklin Delano Roosevelt called it a “date which will live in infamy,” words that resonate even now for those who remember the bombing of Pearl Harbor 60 years ago today.

But with those ranks rapidly dwindling, and with the grim events of Sept. 11 now seared into the consciousness of a new generation, many survivors of the Japanese attack are wondering: After they’re gone, will Dec. 7, 1941, also be a date that will live in memory?

Herbert Franck’s recall of that sunny day on Oahu is as vivid as if he were still a 22-year-old aviation machinist mate first class. Franck was finishing breakfast when he detected the rumble of unfamiliar engines overhead. He and his Navy buddies rushed out of the mess hall to see bombs hurtling down.

“I was very frustrated. I didn’t have any guns,” said Franck, now 82. “The only thing I had in my hand was a breakfast roll, which I threw at the airplane.”

Today, the Coronado resident will join hundreds of fellow members of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Assn. in Hawaii. Like others who endured the event that changed the world, he has made it part of his life’s mission to keep the date alive.

It can be a discouraging task, Franck said, relating a conversation he had recently with a high school senior.

“Do you know Pearl Harbor?” Franck asked the boy.

“No, who’s she?”

Now comes Sept. 11, a new generation’s date of infamy, the date of the first significant attack on the U.S. mainland by an outside enemy since the War of 1812.

Date Is Shorthand for the Event

As for whether Sept. 11 will continue to stir hearts 60 years from now, two camps are emerging. One contends that the aftermath of Sept. 11 will not transform society as dramatically as did Dec. 7, 1941.

The other suggests that the date will endure. There is the magnitude of the Sept. 11 terrorist assault: an estimated 3,300 people killed, an economy wounded. That compares with the 2,400 or so who died at Pearl Harbor.

Moreover, “Sept. 11” has become synonymous with the event, and the label is often rendered more cryptically as 911, which also happens to be the national SOS code.

Joseph B. Hellige, a USC psychology professor and specialist in memory, said he could foresee when a chapter in a history textbook would be titled “Sept. 11, 2001,” akin to “The Bombing of Pearl Harbor.”

“I suspect that that date will be remembered far better and far longer and by more subsequent generations than all the other dates,” Hellige said. “Nobody ever referred to Pearl Harbor as Dec. 7. We never referred to the Kennedy assassination as Nov. 22.”

For each generation, there is a date that becomes etched, seemingly indelibly, in the memory of everyone old enough to be aware. In the 1980s, it was the Challenger space shuttle explosion on Jan. 28, 1986.

But with the passage of time, even destiny-altering dates have a habit of sliding away as the shock subsides and people reflect on the events’ significance.

In earlier times, most youngsters could rattle off when the battles of Gettysburg and Antietam were fought and the day Abraham Lincoln was shot--dates that have faded into the footnotes of history for all but a few exacting students.

July Fourth retains its power, of course, but some holidays intended to commemorate significant events are celebrated more as three-day weekends. Even the names have changed. Students of World War I may recall that Veterans Day was once Armistice Day, but who remembers that Memorial Day was once observed as Decoration Day?

But to many historians, and certainly to its survivors, Pearl Harbor is unique.

“We will forever remember it as inaugurating American participation in the greatest event of the 20th century: World War II,” said David M. Kennedy, a Stanford history professor and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945.”

“There’s no other candidate for an event as sweepingly transformative.”

World War II claimed 50 million lives and toppled fascism. It secured America’s claim as a world leader, but also inaugurated a 45-year Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

“Those are just enormous events,” Kennedy said. “It’s difficult to see [that] the crisis that is now upon us will have that magnitude and legacy.”

Dec. 7, 1941, is one of those “dates that should be part of our national vocabulary,” agreed Steve Gillon, a history professor at the University of Oklahoma and a consultant for the History Channel.

“We’ll have to see about Sept. 11. We’ll have to wait a decade or two before we can pass judgment on the significance of 9-11,” Gillon added.

Word of Dec. 7 stunned the nation, but newsreels took time to surface--in black and white. Many Americans watched the horror of Sept. 11 live in color. Perhaps the communication age will keep both dates fresh, with books, Web sites and videos documenting both events.

Today and this weekend the History Channel will air a variety of programs related to Pearl Harbor and World War II.

This year Dec. 7 also got a boost from the release of the pyrotechnics-laden “Pearl Harbor” film. Despite tepid reviews, the movie has earned $450 million worldwide.

It must be remembered that many Pearl Harbor survivors waited years before they could look with emotions other than shame and embarrassment on having been at that place, at that time.

“In the immediate years after the war, a lot of us who were at Pearl Harbor didn’t want to talk about it,” said Franck, the Coronado veteran. “You don’t walk around bragging when you’ve been shellacked.

“It was our job to keep things like that from happening. We were part of the debacle.”

A Breakdown in Vigilance

There is an irony about Dec. 7 and Sept. 11 not lost on Pearl Harbor survivors. The group dedicates itself to the notion that “eternal vigilance is the price of peace.” Yet, like Pearl Harbor, Sept. 11 demonstrated a fundamental failure of intelligence and a lack of preparedness.

“The terrorists that hit those buildings with airplanes hit a bunch of innocent office workers,” said Ken Garrison, a Pearl Harbor survivor in Tigard, Ore. “We at least had some guns to shoot back with. This was an entirely different act. We should never forget something like that.”

A few years back, a realization struck members of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Assn.: that they alone cannot preserve a memory. Once about 18,000 members strong, the group now has 7,600, and “we’re losing 50 a month,” said Julius Finnern, a survivor from Menomonee Falls, Wis. So a new group was born: the Sons & Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors Assn.

“In the last year or two they’ve had a spurt of growth,” said retired Marine Duffie Clemons, 81, president of the San Diego Carnation Chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Assn. “I guess it’s because we’re disappearing, and somebody’s got to take over.”

But Finnern said he’s not ready to turn over the reins to the offspring.

“The 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor is right around the corner, in 2016, and we’re still going to have survivors there,” Finnern said. He, for one, plans to be around, at 97, to remember.

*

Times researcher Maloy Moore contributed to this report.