“Air Raid On Pearl Harbor, This Is No Drill”: The Men Of That Day…

Weasel Zippers

"Via Fox News:

Only five of the 335 men who survived the unprovoked attack that sunk the USS Arizona on Dec. 7, 1941 remain alive. Donald Stratton, 94, is one of them. He has added to the historical knowledge of that day and the beginning of America’s entry into World War II in a new book, “All the Gallant Men: The First Memoir By a USS Arizona Survivor.”

Typical of so many men of that era, the book (written with Ken Gire) is less about Stratton, a 19-year-old kid from a tiny Nebraska town ravaged by the Great Depression, and more about the men with whom he served.

According to the book, total casualties at Pearl Harbor on that fateful day amounted to 2,403 dead and 1,176 wounded. Many of Stratton’s shipmates lie interred in the bowels of the Arizona, which still secretes oil, a constant reminder to “never forget.”

People too young to have known men of that era, or who never asked grandparents about their World War II experience, will find in Stratton’s book a quality that has declined in modern times — modesty. “We were not extraordinary men,” he writes. “Truth be told, most of us had enlisted because there were precious few jobs to be found where we lived.”

The isolationist spirit was strong in 1941. Here’s Stratton on the patriotism that overwhelmed isolationism after the attack: “Love for country welled up inside seemingly every American, coming out in the songs we sang, in the movies produced, in the newspaper articles that were written. … We were ordinary men. What was extraordinary was the country we loved.

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