Friday, January 7, 2022

No. 451: A Date That Shall Live in Infamy

On December 7, 2021, I gave considerable thought to the 80th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the nation from the Capitol the next morning, he called the date of the attack "a date that shall live in infamy."

My family learned of the attack on the radio at the north end of the living room in our home in Syracuse, New York. In our driveway was our 1936 Oldsmobile sedan, which provided us with very little transportation during the war because of gasoline rationing.

An important 1960 book about World War II is entitled The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer. The book describes in detail what happened in Adolf Hitler's bunker below the Chancellery in Berlin. It was in that bunker where Hitler spent his final days, where he prepared his last will and testament, and where he shot himself to death on April 30, 1945.

I traveled to Hawaii many years after the war. I was deeply moved when I visited the U.S.S. Missouri memorial.

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