(2 of 15)
As operational commander of the Japanese attackers, Fuchida watched and controlled everything. It was Fuchida who had given, exactly at 7:49 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941, the order to attack the strongest naval base in the world: "To! ((the first syllable of totsugekiseyo, meaning: Charge!)) To! To! To!" It was Fuchida who sent back to Tokyo the triumphant signal that the attack had caught the Americans by surprise: "Tora! ((Tiger!)) Tora! Tora!"
Now Fuchida led the attack on the Maryland, another of the eight battleships berthed at the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet headquarters. He saw four bombs hurtling toward their target. "In perfect pattern ((they)) plummeted like devils of doom. They became small as poppy seeds and finally disappeared just as tiny white flashes of smoke appeared on or near the ship."
Pearl Harbor is peaceful now, blue waves in the winter sunshine, an occasional toot of harbor traffic. A concrete canopy shrouds the rusted wreckage of the Arizona, the remains of more than 1,000 American servicemen entombed inside. Her flag is still raised and lowered every day on the mast emerging out of the quiet water.
The anniversary of the greatest U.S. military defeat, the day President Franklin D. Roosevelt called "a date which will live in infamy,"* remains a day of death and disgrace, an inglorious event, and the spirit of reconciliation still bows before gusts of rancor. When President Bush, a World War II fighter pilot, indicated that he would attend the Pearl Harbor anniversary ceremonies, White House spokesmen stiffly squelched any talk of Japanese officials' joining in. So did the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. "We did not invite the Japanese 50 years ago, and we don't want them now," says the association's president, Gerald Glaubitz.
In American mythology, Pearl Harbor still represents, even after a half- century, a classic moment of treachery and betrayal. Certainly it was a moment of historic surprise, a moment when the impossible happened, when warfare suddenly spread, for the first and only time in history, to virtually the whole world. This was the moment that changed Americans from a nation of provincial innocents, not only ignorant of the great world but proud of their ignorance, into a nation that would often have to bear the burdens of rescuing that world. The same cataclysm also changed the Japanese from a people trying to find their place on the rim of the great world into a nation that would eventually redefine that world and place itself at the very center.
The surprise, when it first exploded over Pearl Harbor, was shattering, and everyone who experienced it can still remember what was going on when the news interrupted that quiet Sunday: the Washington Redskins playing the Philadelphia Eagles, Arthur Rubinstein as soloist in the New York Philharmonic broadcast, or just a visit with friends. Trying to explain the national sense of bewilderment, the TIME of that time reflected the kind of racism that implicitly underlay the basic American attitude. "Over the U.S. and its history," declared the weekly newsmagazine, "there was a great unanswered question: What would the people . . . say in the face of the mightiest event of their time? What they said -- tens of thousands of them -- was: 'Why, the yellow bastards!' "