I'm abstaining from Pearl Harbor Posts this year. . .

except I suppose that this is one.

It's not to diminish the significance of the date.  No, not by any means.

But, rather, so as to not crowed out other dates we ought to perhaps focus on this year.

Of course nobody can really demand that anyone focus on a particular date, series of dates, or events, no matter how significant they may be.  People should be mindful of all kinds of serious dates. . . the Battle of Tours. . . the Fall of Constantinople. . . the American Declaration of Independence. . . and others.

But something in the way our minds work or perhaps have been trained to work, causes us to focus on round numbers.  We look at 20 year anniversaries, 50 year one, and 100 years ones, as there's something natural about us doing that.

This year is the centennial, as anyone here surely knows, of the end of World War One.  It's also the centennial of most of the really big American participation in the war.  It's the centennial of our commitment of troops to Russia in a vague effort to do something about the Bolsheviks.  It's the centennial of our first occupation of Germany.

It's also the 77th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

That attack was monumental in its consequences.  But World War Two, in American recollection, has crowded out our memory of World War One.  

The bloodiest battle in American history occurred in World War One, not the Civil War, and not World War Two.  American losses were sustained at, frankly, an unsustainable rate during 1918.  4,000,000 men came under arms with no peacetime buildup, meaning that a huge percentage of American men served in World War One, including the significant American officers, for the most part, of World War Two.

The anniversary of Pearl Harbor has become an auxiliary Veteran's Day/Memorial Day in the United States as the Baby Boomer generation has grown older.  World War Two cast a huge shadow for decades on the United States and remained a hugely proud aspect of our history even through the Vietnam War, but as the generation that came of age in the 1960s became ashamed of the way that they'd treated their parent's generation that fought that war, a lot of late hagiography came in that shined a light on the World War Two generation and deepened the shadow on the one that fought World War One.  Pearl Harbor Day became a focus of that, just as, for awhile, the anniversary of the landings in Normandy in 1944 did as well.

All of that history is important and interesting.  But on this 77th anniversary of the Japanese attack upon the United States which brought us into a war that had been already running since September 1939 in Europe and in China, more or less, since 1931, it might be a good thing to try to recall the soldiers, sailors, marines and coast guardsmen who went to fight a war that had to be fought, but where the call to the crisis was much less clear.