Cooper posed the question in a presentation that covered details of the day President Franklin D. Roosevelt said “will live in infamy” and the rise of Imperial Japan.
Although Americans naturally focus on the Pearl Harbor attack, in December of 1941, the Japanese also launched a two-pronged offensive south into Asia in an attempt to control the Dutch East Indies, whose oil and rubber resources were needed to fuel the empire’s war machine.
The United States had been the source of much of Japan’s oil, scrap metal and other resources during the 1930s. America eventually cut off that trade for fear it was fueling Japanese aggression in Asia.
Cooper said despite that rupture in Japanese-American relations, Asia was not on the radar screens of most Americans, who were busy watching Adolf Hitler invade Poland, then France and the Low Countries, before attacking England.
Although Lend-Lease programs had been established to try to help the British, an isolationist United States officially stayed out of the conflict there, even though most of its citizens had roots there.
Under those circumstances, “I don’t think we’d have gone to war over a Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia,” Cooper said.
The attack on Pearl Harbor made America’s entry into the war in the Pacific immediate and inevitable — and if Cooper is correct, was unnecessary.
Cooper then addressed the attack: How the Japanese fleet avoided shipping lanes to steam undetected across the Pacific, then moved within attack range after dark Dec. 6 to avoid being spotted by American patrol planes.
He then showed the routes taken by waves of Japanese planes toward ships docked at Pearl Harbor and Army Air Force planes parked on runways at Scholfield Barracks, Hickam Field and other installations on Oahu.
Some of the dramatic photos in Cooper’s presentation brought a heavy silence to the conference room and served as fitting prelude to Springfielder Don Ream’s recollections of American servicemen at Pearl Harbor.
Ream recalled Dick Ward, the Springfielder posthumously honored with the Medal of Honor for saving shipmates on the USS Oklahoma.
He remembered, too, the late Reuben Eichmann, who refused to give Ream an autograph on a piece of paper bearing the Japanese flag. Asked if he wanted to be interred on the USS Utah, as permitted for the ship’s veterans, Eichman said he’d been blown off the ship once and had no desire to return.
With Veterans Day less than a week away and the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor a month away, the Heritage Center dedicated its program to veterans’ sacrifice and memory and recalled what Cooper called the “defining moment” of a generation.
(Monday: The Doolittle Raid was the American response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It will be remembered in Monday’s Looking Back.)
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