Monday is Memorial Day, when we honor our veterans of war, wounded and dead from countless encounters throughout our history.
For many Americans of a certain age, Memorial Day has personal meaning, but for many others, particularly younger American men and women, it’s just another Monday holiday with little emotional impact. They were too young to know World War II, or Korea, or to even remember Vietnam and its aftermath and how it tore our country apart.
With the opening of the movie “Pearl Harbor,” the country seems momentarily focused on that day, Dec. 7, 1941, which President Roosevelt called a “day that will live in infamy.” The Malibu Times also decided to focus this week’s Memorial Day issue on that day, when the Japanese Empire attacked Pearl Harbor. Asking around if anyone in Malibu was there on the day of the attack, our staff found three people who were there. I’m sure there are probably more that we don’t yet know about.
Jim Cowan was an 18-year-old college freshman at the University of Hawaii.
Russ Philbrick was serving on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Lexington, which in one of those peculiar quirks of luck or fate left Pearl Harbor just before the attack to ferry some airplanes to Midway. The Japanese failure to find their prime targets, the American aircraft carriers in Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 7 probably changed the course of the Pacific War and most certainly changed Philbrick’s life.
A couple of weeks ago, in the same kind of coincidence, Margaret “Bunty” Prabhu walked into The Malibu Times office, clutching an old family photo album and said, “I think you might want to see this.” She was 10 years old on that fateful day. She described going to the top of a nearby hill, with her older sister Marilyn, then 13, and her younger 8-year-old sister Pat (now Pat Cortazzo), and watching the attack, the planes swooping down and the smoke, and what life was like on the island after the attack. After the air attack that morning they were certain the Japanese were going to come back and invade the islands. It wasn’t until months later, when they were finally evacuated to the mainland in a convoy accompanied by two destroyers, that she felt safe again, as their ship passed under the Golden Gate Bridge in the San Francisco harbor.
I have my own little postscript to add. In the very early 1960s I was a young Naval officer stationed on a salvage/diving ship in Pearl Harbor. It was 20 years after the attack, long before the Arizona Memorial had been built. Every time we went to sea we would pass the Arizona, which is still there lying on the bottom of the ocean. All you could see as you passed by was the outline of the superstructure just under the surface of the murky water. Every once in a while a group of air bubbles would break the surface, as if the 1,000-plus men entombed in that ship were still alive. That sound always made me shudder.
This Memorial Day issue is far from complete. Another longtime Malibu resident, Hal Tucker, came in to tell me about his younger brother, William Edward Tucker, called Tuck. Tuck served on the cruiser Houston, which went down in early 1942. He survived 16 hours in the water, but was captured once he reached land. He was sent, along with many other allied prisoners of war, to work on the notorious jungle railroad line, later made famous in the movie “Bridge on the River Kwai.” He survived for two and a half years, finally succumbing to blood poisoning caused by tropical ulcers on August 8, 1945.
We offer our homage to these men and women, who are not just a sea of crosses or stars in a military cemetery. They were someone’s brother, father, uncle, sister, or friend, and we should stop for a moment on Monday and remember them.