--- title: America Learned the Wrong Lessons From Pearl Harbor description: How we remember Pearl Harbor and World War II has adversely shaped America's role in the world to this day canonical: https://time.com/6125923/america-wrong-lessons-pearl-harbor/ author: TIME article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2021-12-06T18:23:01.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-14T09:17:17.628Z article:section: Ideas og:title: America Learned the Wrong Lessons From Pearl Harbor—And the World Is Still Living With the Consequences og:description: How we remember Pearl Harbor and World War II has adversely shaped America's role in the world to this day og:url: https://time.com/6125923/america-wrong-lessons-pearl-harbor/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd3fa7ab26c3af89c/698a206122fb853546e2ce9f/pearl-harbor-anniversary.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: pearl-harbor-anniversary og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: America Learned the Wrong Lessons From Pearl Harbor—And the World Is Still Living With the Consequences twitter:description: How we remember Pearl Harbor and World War II has adversely shaped America's role in the world to this day twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd3fa7ab26c3af89c/698a206122fb853546e2ce9f/pearl-harbor-anniversary.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # America Learned the Wrong Lessons From Pearl Harbor—And the World Is Still Living With the Consequences > Sponsored content. 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A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/newsletters?i=f81a6933-1405-4840-a718-efc9cbd3b449&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1) ## Video: UNKNOWN: Eighty Years After Pearl Harbor, Two Brothers Are Identified By DNA [Watch (HLS stream): UNKNOWN: Eighty Years After Pearl Harbor, Two Brothers Are Identified By DNA](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/EZaceMGY.m3u8) (8:04)  _Published 2021-11-23. The DPAA is an obscure unit inside the Pentagon, which scours the globe for the remains of long-lost service members who vanished in the air, land or sea during combat. This short documentary from TIME takes viewers along as the DPAA utilizes DNA and forensic analysis to identify the Trapp brothers, and ultimately bring them home to their family._ by [Elizabeth D. Samet](https://time.com/author/elizabeth-d-samet/) ## Elizabeth D. Samet Dec 6, 2021 6:23 PM UTC The DPAA is an obscure unit inside the Pentagon, which scours the globe for the remains of long-lost service members who vanished in the air, land or sea during combat. This short documentary from TIME takes viewers along as the DPAA utilizes DNA and forensic analysis to identify the Trapp brothers, and ultimately bring them home to their family. by [Elizabeth D. Samet](https://time.com/author/elizabeth-d-samet/) ## Elizabeth D. Samet Dec 6, 2021 6:23 PM UTC On Tuesday, December 7, 2021, we will remember Pearl Harbor, the 1941 Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base on Oahu, Hawaii, for the eightieth time. It is a ritual remembrance that has much to reveal about Americans’ present-day understanding of themselves and their country’s role in the world, especially at a moment when we are also trying to understand the exit from Afghanistan. What happens on such anniversaries reveals the double edge of a nation’s memory, which offers a sense of strength and unity even as it tends to foreclose a certain kind of future. We will remember Pearl Harbor in unsurprising ways: there will be the customary memorial parade in Hawaii (the theme of which is to be _Valor, Sacrifice, and Peace_); television networks will run World War II programming; newscasters will introduce segments of documentary footage and interviews with some of the dwindling number of World War II veterans. These remembrances will be both solemn and sentimental: they will awaken the nostalgia of a confused country for a period of supposed clarity, when good and evil could be readily discerned and disentangled, when the U.S. wielded its military might in the service of liberating the world from its oppressors, and when the exercise of violent force brought about a definitive resolution. Americans were being taught how to remember the events of December 7, 1941, almost as soon as they happened. Hours after learning of the attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dictated the first draft of his War Message to Congress. He would revise the initial language, [“a date which will live in world history,”](https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/day-of-infamy.) into what would ultimately become the speech’s most well-known phrase, “a date which will live in infamy.” _Merriam-Webster_ [notes](https://www.merriam-webster.com/news-trend-watch/a-date-which-will-live-in-infamy-20161207) that Roosevelt’s language is frequently _mis_remembered as “day of infamy.” But it also reports a yearly spike in lookups of the word _infamy_. In other words, the core message of treachery summoning a righteous vengeance has not been lost even if our recollection is imperfect and even if Americans have to be reminded annually of what the word actually means. Infamy—perfidy and surprise—and the compulsion to exact revenge for it shaped the narrative from the beginning. In _Cultures of War_, the historian John W. Dower called the word _infamy_ a “code” that would teach Americans how to understand not only Pearl Harbor but also, ultimately, 9/11, after which the word again appeared in newspaper headlines and speeches, thus indelibly linking the two attacks. 1n 1941, organizing chaotic violence and suffering into a story with meaning, propaganda [posters](https://pearlharbor.org/pearl-harbor-propaganda-posters/) soon gave graphic representation to these concepts. Sometimes featuring a fist raised in defiance or a tattered flag, they enjoined the American public to “Avenge Pearl Harbor” by making bullets or ships, buying war bonds, or joining the navy or coast guard “NOW.” Americans were exhorted to do all of these things so that those who perished at Pearl Harbor would not have “died in vain.” Relentless calls to “remember” served as a goad to revenge, and the propagandists’ message gave us a vocabulary still in use today for framing American violence. In a representative example, a [postcard](https://dslab.lib.rochester.edu/rej/wp-content/gallery/propoganda/pc%5Fantjpn%5F07.jpg) features a sailor remarking to two shipmates as they watch a Japanese ship they’ve just shelled sink: “Just a little something ‘to remember Pearl Harbor.’” A [poster](https://pearlharbor.org/pearl-harbor-propaganda-posters/), which proclaims “Make him pay for that day,” depicts a knife plunged into a calendar open to December 7, while [another](https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/95503251/), portraying a blind serviceman, demands, “He CAN’T forget Pearl Harbor—Can you?” Just a week after the attack, Don Reid and Sammy Kaye produced the song “Remember Pearl Harbor,” which proclaimed to its listeners that all those who died on December 7 died “for liberty.” When the journalist Eric Sevareid, recently returned from Europe, heard it, he [mocked](https://archive.org/details/notsowilddream00seva) the song for its “saccharine melody” and referred to it as “Remember-r-r Pearl Harbor-r-r.” He was also disgusted by the atmosphere of the New York night clubs in which people danced to it. The spectacle seemed to Sevareid typical of America’s cynical response to a war they had only just joined. He saw not patriotic fervor but a kind of visceral excitement: there was “money to burn,” fashion had seized on the “military motif,” black marketeers thrived, jingoistic newspaper “headlines blared the good news every time that three Jap planes went down,” and billboards told consumers that Wrigley’s gum and Lucky Strikes “had gone to war.” Americans were persuaded that the country “could produce its way to victory,” but they ignored the political and social realities of a world in flames. “Little men sneered at the Four Freedoms,” Sevareid recalled, “and the great vision of the century of the common man was sneered at as ‘globaloney.’” That’s not the way we remember it now. We imagine that everything changed overnight. But, as the historian Richard W. Steele carefully [documented](https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/65/3/704/695966?redirectedFrom=fulltext), by early 1942, only two months after the attack, members of the Roosevelt Administration were already worrying that the public had lost interest. On February 16, _Time_ ran a [story](http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,766363,00.html) with the headline, “THE PEOPLE: Smug, Slothful, Asleep?” It catalogued a list of warnings expressed by everyone from Eleanor Roosevelt to James Landis, the executive head of Civil Defense, to Edward R. Murrow that, as Murrow put it, Americans “do not fully appreciate the need for speed … do not quite understand that if we delay too long in winning the victory we will inherit nothing but a cold, starving embittered world… Already there are signs that we’re coming to accept slavery and suppression as part of the pattern of living in this year of disgrace.” General Johnson was more succinct: “The general public . . . simply does not seem to give a tinker’s dam.” The further irony is that it is far less convenient to remember the Pacific Theater than it is the European. The brutality of the war against Japan, often racially motivated on both sides, as Dower chronicled in [_War Without Mercy_](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/42475/war-without-mercy-by-john-w-dower/), and its ready association with the internment camps at home, does not easily fit into the narrative of the Good War we prefer to remember today. While Pearl Harbor was the catalyst for our entrance into the conflict, we have ever since tended to overlook the Pacific in favor of the war against the Nazis. The real and immediate consequences of the war we have chosen to remember—chiefly the liberation of Europe from fascist tyranny—offered then and still offers us the most attractive version of ourselves. Yet that liberation, together with the establishment of a new world order, gave us a false impression that the violent force we inflict on others would inevitably yield virtuous results. Our memory also omits certain compromising details: our reluctance to enter the war on behalf of liberating anyone, our callousness toward the fate of Europe’s Jews, our short-lived interest in denazification, our exportation of segregation to postwar Europe. In recent years, we have become increasingly enthralled with the idea that when Americans die, they die for liberty, and thus we are repeatedly committed to sending more righteous liberators to die—in Iraq, in Afghanistan—so that others will not have died “in vain.” We seem also to have grown to love the idea of being hated for our freedom, for “our way of life,” and this leads quite naturally to an obsession with American greatness and goodness. We can find aggrieved, reductive versions of this exceptionalist belief on t-shirts or in the lyrics of a pop song like Darryl Worley’s “Have You Forgotten?” But we can also discern an influence on national policy. The assumption that when Americans fight they fight for liberty has a long history, but that assumption, together with a confidence in the exceptional nature of American violence as a mode of deliverance, has been used since World War II to frame and to justify a series of dubious military actions. This is especially true of our most recent conflicts. It clearly undergirded President George W. Bush’s victory declaration in the War on Terror on the decks of the USS _Abraham Lincoln_ in 2003: “In this battle, we have fought for the cause of liberty and for the peace of the world,” he told the assembled sailors, “And wherever you go, you carry a message of hope, a message that is ancient and ever new. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, ‘To the captives, come out; and to those in darkness, be free.’” Such faith—or a cynical appeal to it—likewise inspires us to cling amid the ruins to our unintentional, impermanent liberation of women in Afghanistan. Commemoration is a natural, normal, even necessary part of any culture. Remembrance can forge a sense of collectiveness otherwise elusive, especially in a fractured democracy like our own. But when memory is so tightly yoked to righteous indignation—as is the case with Pearl Harbor or 9/11—it risks becoming pathological by obstructing the growth essential to a nation’s progress. World War II was an aberration in so many ways: the existential threat posed by fascism, the unequivocal necessity of our participation, and the decisiveness of Allied victory are only the most obvious. When we remember Pearl Harbor, we find ourselves in the position of Orpheus, suddenly mistrusting Hades’ bargain, compelled to look back, only to discover that Eurydice has vanished. Betrayed by the last twenty years, we grasp in vain to retrieve an elusive glory. Our tragic postwar mistake was in thinking that the consequences of World War II could be endlessly duplicated. Over the years we have somehow developed a capacity to be surprised when American military might doesn’t establish, as it once helped to do, a new world but instead, after twenty wasteful years of occupation, fitful nation-building, and unfounded confidence, are left right back where we started. There is a cruel and particular irony in the paradox that a country the imagination of which has always been knit so tightly to the future—to the seductive dream of beginning anew—now finds itself in the position of hoping that history will miraculously repeat itself. ## Transcript December 7, 1941. The Trapp brothers were assigned to the battleship USS Oklahoma. The ship was attacked by Japanese aircraft, which caused it to quickly capsize. Resulted in the loss of life for 429 crew members. We were unable to identify these brothers. I've always said that, as a nation, we had the will and the funding to send those young men off to war. Now we should have the will and provide the funding to bring those young men back home. DPAA was established in 2015, having the mandate to search for, recover and identify the unknowns from World War Two to present. We like puzzles. Sometimes there's a puzzle that sits on a table and you get 98 of the pieces in place and then there's two pieces missing. I don't think you put the puzzle away. December 7 would come around, and it was really difficult for my mom to talk about it. I mean, we knew she had brothers, but it wasn't a topic until I was older. I think the story came to light when looking through pictures. They were just playmates growing up. She loved them dearly. Harold, or Hal, was very studious and wanted to be an engineer. William is the one who wanted to enlist, and because they were so close, they enlisted together on the same day. And it's been 80 years since they passed away. The attack on Pearl Harbor occurred on December 7, 1941. The USS Oklahoma capsized, trapping about 400 sailors and marines inside. The Trapp brothers, I just felt for those families. Getting the word that you've lost both of your sons. I can't imagine the grief that they had to live with. The Navy's policy is, the men that were on the ship, that becomes their final resting place. It's kind of like being buried at sea. The difference with the Oklahoma was, because they thought they could salvage the ship, they had Navy divers going in, retrieving the remains of those that had died. Right after the war, the U.S. Army Mortuary tried their best to identify these guys. And for whatever reason, various reasons, they couldn't identify them. And that's why they were transferred to Hawaii and buried as unknowns. As a nation, like this is how we move on. You know, because we didn't have the technology. So you have to move on. I don't think people understand what it means to have somebody who has been unidentified for 75 years. It affects the generations. My grandmother, she died from her grief and my mother, it did affect her. When the DPAA reached out to us it was just like a miracle. Families will always tell me, "Just bring me something." "My father, my brother, bring him back to us." Once we had the possibility of utilizing DNA, we realized that we could probably make some identifications of those individuals that had been buried as unknowns from the USS Oklahoma. Our identification process begins well before anything comes into our laboratory, so our historians and analysts are doing a lot of research. We have a case file on each one of our unaccounted-for service members. Their dental records, medical records, even just their age, stature, that we would use for our identifications. The USS Oklahoma was a long project. There's 208 bones in the human body, and there were 429 individuals on that ship. We were dealing with a highly-commingled set of remains. About a quarter of the ship was represented in one casket. We estimated that we'd probably do about 5,000 DNA samples. The identification that we're making is based on mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA is something that's passed down through maternal lineage. And so anybody in that maternal lineage would have the same mitochondrial DNA sequence. They sent us the tests in the mail, we also got three tests for our children. So they had a good DNA sample or mitochondrial DNA sample. And then from there, we were able to use dental as well as anthropological methods to then individuate the brothers. So we knew dentally which skull belonged to which brother, and then the stature really came into play. So Harold is several inches taller than William. So just from the length of the bones, we were able to determine which brother was which. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced today that brothers Harold F. Trapp and William H. Trapp, who were killed during World War Two, were accounted for on November 24 of 2020. I simply want to recognize that there is grief, recognize that there is loss, and recognize that because of the advance of technology, we've now been able to correctly and fully identify. So it's my honor today to be with you to bring honor to this family. Carol, on behalf of the President of the United States, a grateful nation, and the US Navy, please accept this flag as a token of our appreciation for your loved ones' honorable sacrifices. Thank you We anticipated that we were going to be able to identify about 80% of the unaccounted for from the USS Oklahoma. And now that we're coming to a close, we've been able to identify over 340 individuals. We're not gonna find them all. But we're not gonna leave any stone unturned. We will pursue it until, you know, there's nothing more that we can do. That identification is really important. You just have no idea what it means to have this closure. They are home, they are home, and that's a good feeling. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6125923/america-wrong-lessons-pearl-harbor/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6125923/america-wrong-lessons-pearl-harbor/"},"headline":"America Learned the Wrong Lessons From Pearl Harbor—And the World Is Still Living With the Consequences","datePublished":"2021-12-06T18:23:01.000Z","dateModified":"2026-10-14T09:17:17.628Z","description":"How we remember Pearl Harbor and World War II has adversely shaped America's role in the world to this day","url":"https://time.com/6125923/america-wrong-lessons-pearl-harbor/","keywords":["Books"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd3fa7ab26c3af89c/698a206122fb853546e2ce9f/pearl-harbor-anniversary.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Elizabeth D. 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