Reeling Back

Franklin Roosevelt established the narrative. In a seven-minute speech to a Joint Session of Congress, the 32nd U.S. president described December 7th, 1941, as "a date that will live in infamy." Today, the 72nd anniversary of Imperial Japan's attack on the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii, those words will be heard again in news broadcasts marking the event, which resulted in the U.S. formally entering the Second World War in an alliance with Great Britain. The narrative, establishing Japan as an enemy with an agenda of conquest that threatened America, was taken up by Hollywood and is accepted to this day. It is, of course, the business of historians to challenge such narratives in search of larger truths. Stripped of emotion, the evidence suggests that Japan's attack was a preemptive strike against a perceived aggressor, one that was carried out with surgical precision. As early as 1957, in his book Day of Infamy, historian Walter Lord noted that the city of Honolulu was not attacked, and the handful of civilian deaths there were due to what we now call "friendly fire." Issues of peace and war can prompt heavy thinking among movie-makers. Or, in the case of The Final Countdown, hardly any thinking at all.