Letter 131: Remembering Pearl Harbour -- what it was and what it was not

"Yesterday, December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan." 

--President Franklin D. Roosevelt; 8th December 1941

"I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people -- and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!"

--President George W. Bush; 14th September 2001

On September 10th of 2001, I spent time in Detroit, Michigan getting ready to bury my Uncle Henry. My cousin, Nancy, a successful investment banker on Wall Street, made a fateful remark as she reflected on the fact that a decorated war hero of Okinawa in 1945, her father, would be laid to rest on September 11th. She noted that we were facing the end of an era.  

The next day, of course, the United States suffered the worst foreign attack on her soil since the sneak-attack of the Japanese on Pearl Harbor, nearly sixty years before. The horrific events of that morning overshadowed my uncle’s funeral that coincided with them. My cousin, Peter, summed it up well by counselling a respectful good-bye since his warrior-father would want us to kick some ass.

With the funeral complete, I drove my sister back to her daughters in Annapolis post-haste since my brother-in-law was stuck in Montreal. Then, shedding the Avis, I Amtracked it back to New York, wondering where the usual land-mark of the city was. There was a factory, somewhere beyond view, belching smoke; something I had not noticed previously. But no twin towers. Then, I remembered. Oh, my God.

After a forever ride under Lincoln Tunnel – one never knew where these suicidal sociopaths would strike next – I found that the fastest way from Penn Station through the newly minted Pottersville to my apartment was simply to walk. After a run and vain offer of blood, I settled in my desk at the bank. As the Global Industry Credit Manager for Insurance at the world’s largest bank and overseeing a $35 billion portfolio, I knew I would have my work cut out for me.

What I did not expect, however, was the touch of international diplomacy that I would have to bring to the maelstrom of work, speculation and contingency planning. My rapidly calculated estimate of losses insurers would have to indemnify, from the ground up would eventually prove to be one of the best across Wall Street (within 5% of industry losses after five or six years). 

Luck of the Irish, I suppose – actually, I know.  On that estimate and analysis of expected impacts of the sneak terror attack, I had to append a cover-memo to twenty managers around the world reporting to me providing guidance for the days to follow.

The Ghost of Pearl Harbour. Along the way, the Japanese credit manager e-mailed me that he was very hurt by the comparisons between 9-11 and the sneak attack on Pearl Harbour of December 7th of 1941. My heart went out to him since the two attacks seemed different, at least intuitively. Having spent some time in Australia as a kid, I also figured the Aussies were flakking him mercilessly.

That evening, days after 9-11, I stayed in very late researching Pearl Harbour and what we knew about the mass murders in New York for that cover-memo. As I released my coincidentally accurate estimate, I decided to be very firm with these managers. With British, German, American, Australian and Canadian managers among others receiving my guidance, I had to be sensitive to all sides.

Consequently, I concluded that 9-11 was not Pearl Harbour; it was worse, far worse. While Pearl Harbour was certainly an act of war, for which the Japanese paid mightily, to equate the two attacks was to dishonour the Japanese. Why? Because 99%+ of the people killed on December 7, 1941 were U.S. military personnel, primarily sailors and grunts.

Most of the few civilians not affiliated with military facilities who had died were hit by falling anti-aircraft flak. In New York, suicidal sociopaths using religion as a rationale for murder had slaughtered thousands of innocents; thankfully we would find out that the death toll was 20-30% of what we had feared initially. Nevertheless, that massacre had been deliberate and that planning had made it a monstrous evil. 

The Japanese, however, had limited their attack to military targets sixty years before. In that memorandum, I made it clear that to compare the two attacks would be to dishonour the Japanese airmen by equating the opening gambit of war with wantonly killing civilians. I closed with a warning that said, in effect, “Such prejudice is utterly unacceptable and I will not hear it as we proceed through the difficult days ahead.”