Sunsets and History

 Pearl Harbor Day

Sunset Filling the Sky
Ellicott City, MD
December 6, 2025

As the light faded from the western sky last evening, I was provided a glimpse of beauty in the sunset. Sunsets are transitory, ephemeral. They change from moment to moment until they fade into darkness. But, for the time they are visible they can be spectacular.

Last evening's sunset was such a sunset. The low clouds reflected the red hues of sunset all across the sky. It was nearly a 360 degree sunset. What made this sunset special was the beams of light emanating from the now below the horizon sun. I don't see those often and against the naked winter trees, it was a stark, and at the same time, cold image. 

It is fitting that such sunset precedes a day when we remember the price of complacency. It could not possibly happen. Our fleet and military was safe at rest in Hawaii on that fateful Sunday morning when the realities of the world came for the United States with torpedos, guns, bullets, bombs, and tragically death. 

On the sunny Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Messman Doris Miller had served breakfast aboard the USS West Virginia, stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was collecting laundry when the first of nine Japanese torpedoes hit the ship.

In the deadly confusion, Miller reported to an officer, who told him to help move the ship’s mortally wounded captain off the bridge. Unable to move him far, Miller pulled the captain to shelter. Then another officer ordered Miller to pass ammunition to him as he started up one of the two abandoned anti-aircraft guns in front of the conning tower.

Miller had not been trained to use the weapons because, as a Black man in the U.S. Navy, he was assigned to serve the white officers. But while the officer was distracted, Miller began to fire one of the guns. He fired it until he ran out of ammunition. Then he helped to move injured sailors to safety before he and the other survivors abandoned the West Virginia, which sank to the bottom of Pearl Harbor. (Letters from an American)

America fought World War II to defend democracy from fascism. And while fascism preserved hierarchies in society, democracy called on all men as equals. Of the more than 16 million Americans who served in the war, more than 1.2 million were Black American men and women, 500,000 were Latinos, and more than 550,000 Jews were part of the military. Among the many ethnic groups who fought, Indigenous Americans served at a higher percentage than any other ethnic group—more than a third of able-bodied Indigenous men between the ages of 18 and 50 joined the service—and among those 25,000 soldiers were the men who developed the famous “Code Talk,” based in tribal languages, that codebreakers never cracked.

The American president at the time, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hammered home that the war was about the survival of democracy. Fascists insisted that they were moving their country forward fast and efficiently—claiming the trains ran on time, for example, although in reality they didn’t—but FDR constantly noted that the people in Italy and Germany were begging for food and shelter from the soldiers of democratic countries.

Ultimately, the struggle between fascism and democracy was the question of equality. Were all men really created equal as the Declaration of Independence said, or were some born to lead the rest, whom they held subservient to their will? (Letters from an American)

When America came under attack before, people like Doris Miller refused to let that happen. For all that American democracy still discriminated against him, it gave him room to stand up for the concept of human equality—and he laid down his life for it. Promoted to cook after the Navy sent him on a publicity tour, Miller was assigned to a new ship, the USS Liscome Bay, which was struck by a Japanese torpedo on November 24, 1943. It sank within minutes, taking two thirds of the crew, including Miller, with it. (Letters from an American)

 

-- Bob Doan, Odenton, MD

Programming Note: Monday Musings will not be published tomorrow as it is a travel day and Chris, Finn, and I are headed south, back to the warmth.