December 7, 1941 Found Harvard, Like U.S., Unaware

For several days headlines in the United Press column of the CRIMSON Proclaimed in ominous tones that negotiations between the American and the Japanese were breaking up. But nobody in Cambridge paid much attention. Just another crisis, like the now-forgotten Reuben James, Greer and Kearney affairs, everybody said, if, indeed, they noticed the stories at all.

So students and professor alike settid down to listen to the weekly bread-cast of the Philharmonic orchestra that Sunday afternoon. In preparation for History I quizzes the next day, men attacked Thompson and Johnson with their accustomed desperate urgency. Some went to movies, others lingered at dinner. All in all, it was a very ordinary lazy Harvard Sunday afternoon.

Then, with the suddenness of the attack itself, radio crackled out the fearful news that the Japs were bombing Pearl Harbor.

College Receives News

And everyone Knew that a new era was beginning. All afternoon tense groups huddled around radios, and some brought little portables down into the dining halls to catch the latest news. "Did you hear we sunk an aircraft carrier of their's off the Panama Canal? Manila has been bombed several times? Most of our fleet was out of the harbor at the time, and the Nips only sunk an old target ship and a couple of destroyers, anyway. Well, this is it."

It seemed as though everyone at Harvard came to the CRIMSON building that night, and anxiously hung over the tickertape machine to watch the little metal letters hammer out the words that told the story of America's greatest defeat, that spelled death for thousands, of sacrifice for millions, of an all-embracing up-heaval in the life and plans of every man, woman and child in the nation.

Discussed in Lectures

One professor had just been telling friends at Sunday dinner why the Japanese would never start a war now. He came out of the house to read the headlines. Another spent all of his Friday lecture explaining with iron logic that the Nipponese could not open hostilities for a long time to come; Monday's hour was filled with an equally convincing explanation of why they could do nothing but what they did.

On Monday morning CRIMSON headlines shrieked "UNIVERSITY DELAYS IMMEDIATE ACTION AS AMERICAS PREPARE TO FIGHT AXIS; 4 Jap Subs Sunk, Many Planes Fall Near Hawaii; College Defers Changes; Faculty Voices Opinion." Said Government Professor Bruce Hopper, now presumably some-where across the seas, "The Japs have delivered it into our hands on a platter. The hot-headed Japanese have played right into our hands. By this move she has written herself off in history as a great power." Claimed Pitirim A. Sorekin, professor of Sociology, "Personally, for many years I have been warning that Japan has been preparing, not only against Russia, but against the United States and Great Britain."

The CRIMSON stated editorially that "We are aware that it is we who will be fighting this war. We know that after it is all over it will be some of us who will have our names engraved on the College's bronze memorial. We sincerely believe that we will be able to win our war, and to win our peace as well. We have starry-eyed idealistic hopes of a peace not just in our sons' time, but for all time. We believe in our country and in the right, and we believe that in the present war they are synonymous. In that belief we fight, and in that belief we will triumph." That editorial is just as true today as it was one year ago.