December 7, 2025

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

For decades at the former Rockland Journal-News, a daily newspaper in the country, then suburbia north of New York City, each December 7 would bring interviews with local survivors of “a date which will live infamy,” the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that pushed an isolationist United States into World War II.

The stories were always poignant, the memories of lost comrades difficult for survivors to retell. The newspaper’s coverage would be extensive in some years; in others there was less mention. That is the way with major events in history, an in-the-moment reaction to what else is going on in the world, nationally, in the local universe: the economy, politics, other immediate concerns.

On the afternoon of December 7, 1941, a lazy Sunday as Christmas was nearing in the waning days of the Great Depression, just after radio stations broke into programming with the attack announcement, Rockland quickly began turning gears. Former Marine Garry Onderdonk of Spring Valley was recommended as county defense coordinator, then Draft Board chairman. Government officials met right away to plan aircraft spotting towers. In the following week, volunteer groups were set up to save scrap materials for war production, eventually to wrap bandages and send gifts to the armed forces. In the months ahead, as communities saw gas rationing and food restrictions, Camp Shanks in Orangeburg, the largest East Coast embarkation point, began to fill vegetable crop fields. It would later be the staging point for the D-day order of battle, U.S. Army.

More than 2,400 American servicemen and civilians were killed in the December 7th surprise Japanese attack on the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, with 1,178 wounded. Nineteen Navy ships were destroyed or damaged, including eight battleships, and 188 aircraft were knocked out. The following day, Congress declared war on Japan, and on December 11, Germany and Italy said they were at war with the United States.

Depression would end with the war production of 1941-’45. There would be many battles affecting Rockland communities and families in death and sorrow as well as throughout the nation. Post-war would bring the rise of the middle class, slow changes for the better in society and in equality but also the gnawing fear of the Cold War and then the ominous warning from a general of war – Dwight Eisenhower – of the insidious ripping of the American fabric by the tentacles of the military/industrial complex. In a real way, it was a warning of the coming Vietnam War and the horrors so inflicted and surely of the present growing greed and march toward authoritarianism.

While today calls on us to bow heads and pray for the Pearl Harbor dead, indeed for all those in the war of every nation who were killed, physically maimed and emotionally invaded, we must also recognize how quickly and with such deep commitment the country and its people then responded to dictators who sought to rule the world in utter authoritarianism. That was an honorable chapter in the American Experiment, as opposed to what is happening today.

It would be disrespectful to the war dead, the wounded, to those still with nightmares from any war to forget that Pearl Harbors begin when democracy is sought as the ultimate casualty. We owe it to the however fallen to now protect what they died and suffered for, to continue the American Experiment less they have given in vain.

The writer is a retired newspaperman. (ahgunther@yahoo.com).

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