best of times; the worst of times, The

Flight Journal, Oct 2001 by Davisson, Budd

As I write this, the U.S. is being hammered by a media blitz kicked off by the release of the movie "Pearl Harbor." Every network and cable system is feeding us a steady diet of facts about that most infamous of Sunday mornings. It makes you wonder how the nation can possibly top that kind of coverage when the actual 60th anniversary in December rolls around.

The "Pearl Harbor" media blitz has been terrific. We hope it brought home to a new generation what happened on that day and how-more than any other single event in recent history-it transformed the world.

The attack galvanized the U.S. into a single-minded body intent on lending its industrial might to win a war we might never have entered if the Japanese hadn't blind-sided us. It had the effect of shooting the "good guy" in the back, and America responded in a typically American manner: outrage drove us to beat the enemy, no matter what the cost.

What was overlooked during much of the reporting was that most of the world had been at war for as long as two years prior to that sunny morning in Hawaii. China had long felt the aggressor's boots, and Great Britain had been fighting for its life. War may have been new to us, but it was a familiar demon in many other parts of the globe.

Britain had weathered its own watershed more than a year earlier, when its heroic pilots, backed by a beleaguered population, fought nose to nose with the German Luftwaffe and won. What became known as the Battle of Britain wasn't played out in a matter of hours but dragged on for months. Hitler sent the best he could muster across the Channel-day after day, night after night. Each time the Luftwaffe's planes appeared on the horizon, the RAF was there to hold them at bay and make them pay a horrible price. Hitler's plans to dominate Europe were derailed by barely a handful of hardcharging pilots and planes.

If you wanted to single out some of the events that had the biggest impact on the War, one of these would have to be the timing of the Japanese attack. If Japan's declaration of war had been delivered before the attack was under way, our anger would have been the same, but perhaps our sense of outrage wouldn't have been so gut-wrenching nor the effect of the attack so strong. At the same time, if Japan had timed the attack to catch U.S. carriers in port, the War in the Pacific would have been entirely different.

Another event that changed everything was that Hitler honored his mutual protection pact with Japan and declared war on the U.S. Had he not done that, the U.S. might have stayed on the sidelines of the European conflict. The outcome might have been a negotiated peace that would have left Germany with huge areas of captured territory-which was Hitler's plan in the first place. He didn't have to declare war on the U.S., but he did, and in so doing, he brought our country and its industrial might into a conflict that changed the face of history.

Today, as we look back on that time, we seem driven to dissect it down to the tiniest piece of hardware and the smallest historical nuance. Many of the period's artifacts, such as flight jackets and flight gear, were produced by the millions but have now become so rare that they command both respect and high prices. The stories of venerated veterans are told and retold, as though we are repeating legends of our ancestors around the campfire. We seem to have an insatiable appetite for knowledge about a time we see as (to borrow a well-known phrase) "the best of times and the worst of times."

The nations who were the victors all look back on that period as a golden era of national achievement that will never be duplicated. With luck, we'll never again see a need for that kind of effort. Still, wouldn't it be nice to feel that sense of unity they felt, as they all pulled together toward a common goal? We would like to think that, if circumstances required it, we would still pull together. But chances are we'll never know.