Up From Infamy

Seventy-nine years ago today, the Empire of Japan declared war on the United States. It was, as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt described it to a joint session of Congress the following day, "a date which will live in infamy." 

It, of course, proved to be much more.  In that instant, borne out of a sun-filled Sunday morning in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, this nation became an active participant in World War II.  We fought against the Germans and the Italians in Europe through the spring of 1945, when Germany's surrender brought an end to the war on the Continent. We fought against the Japanese throughout and all over the Pacific until August 1945 when, following President Truman's orders to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and, thereafter, on Nagasaki, the Japanese finally surrendered. 

Buoyed by a common purpose and imbued by the knowledge that failure was simply not an option, we the people of these United States came together. We did what was necessary because it was necessary. It took courage to do it. It took imagination to do it. It took determination to do it.   

Spoiler alert:  America did it.  

-AK