December 7, 1941 Is A Day That Has Lived In Infamy

The bombing of Pearl Harbor shaped the course of the Greatest Generation. The sailors and Marines who were on the USS Arizona had no idea war was coming. To wake up in your ship and be completely blindsided by bloodshed and chaos is a scene that I can’t wrap my head around. In his book, “All The Gallant Men,” Donald Stratton, who was 94 years old at the time of its penning, talks about what happened on the USS Arizona. Donald grew up in a small town in Nebraska. He joined the Navy because his family couldn’t afford to eat. He talks about sending money home to his mother and father each week while ironing his shipmates’ clothes to make a few extra dollars. He went from being a poor Nebraskan to the only survivor of Pearl Harbor to write a memoir. The first portion of the book he explains why he wrote it. He says, “If I died without writing this book, the library of the events from that day on the Arizona dies with me. I wrote this book so people could continue to check this story out from the library.”

Stratton goes on to say that people don’t realize that most of the ammunition that would be used to fight off the Japanese Zero Pilots was locked far under the decks of the Arizona, which is as long as two football fields. The sailors and Marines on deck had to fight to survive with largely the ammunition at their stations. When the big guns ran out, they switched to medium machine guns, and then light machine guns, and then rifles, and finally pistols. The fear that must have shot through their bodies while they were firing pistols at kamikaze pilots is something that I can’t grasp. Men like Donald Stratton are the picture of courage not being the absence of fear but rather moving forward in the presence of fear.