Remembering Pearl Harbor with flags
One year after the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that launched the U.S. into World War II, Americans commemorated the “day of infamy” with coast-to-coast flags.
In Boston, for example, the Bunker Hill Boys Club observed “one minute of silence…in respect of the service men who gave their lives” a year earlier. The ceremony included the playing of “Taps” as a service flag was lifted. Service flags were banners displaying stars for family members in the military.
What happened in Boston was echoed at the Temple Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., which remembered Pearl Harbor with prayers, the singing of patriotic songs and the dedication of a service flag.
Memorial services were also held in the Midwest. For example, ceremonies in Cleveland, Ohio, took several forms, reported The Plain Dealer, including promises of “peak production” of armaments, Civil Air Patrol planes “bombing” the city with “leaflets urging purchase of [war] bonds” and a suburban neighborhood that raised an American flag while children marched around the block.
Farther west, in Boise, Idaho, the daily paper told how employees at an air field “are strutting proudly these days, and the reason is flying from the top of the depot building.” Waving there was a “merit flag” that marked the extraordinary efforts of the workers to excel their war production goals.
Southern states followed suit. In Raleigh, North Carolina, men from the state college who had been “killed or captured since the war started a year ago” were remembered at the college. “The flag was lowered” to half-staff, the article noted, “and a bugler sounded Taps.”
In High Point, N.C., a Pearl Harbor service was hosted by another local college. The campus bell chimed at 7 a.m., marking the approximate time the 1941 attack started, and the names of students now in the service were recited. As a bugle played “Taps,” the audience recited the pledge to the American flag.
The Charleston Evening Post in South Carolina covered a “Remember Pearl Harbor Program” at a local school. There, “the opening of the program included a prayer, pledge to the flag and the singing of ‘America.’”
The same spirit reached to the West Coast. In San Diego, workers at the naval base bought thousands of dollars of war bonds. Their generosity was honored with the presentation of a War Bond Flag, “the first of its kind to be awarded to a west coast naval establishment,” said The San Diego Union.
Perhaps the most stirring event occurred in California when a group of 14 Boy Scouts “stood off a milling mob which…tried to seize the American flag in the midst of a…riot.” When one rioter tried to bring down Old Glory, the Scouts “surrounded the flagpole” and brandished stones to defend the banner. “And the flag was not hauled down.”
What made that action special – and ironic – is that the boys who defended the flag were Japanese-American teens, and the site was Manzanar, the camp where they and 100,000 others were interned by the U.S. government during WWII.