News & Letters, June 2001

Pearl Harbor

by Felix Martin

December 1991--Fifty years ago I was a sailor in the U.S. Navy on the USS Vestal, at Pearl Harbor. The American capitalist news media has made such a big deal about the 50th anniversary of the Japanese attack that I want to state what it means to me--as a worker and as someone who almost lost his life that day.

Since Dec. 7, 1941 we've been told to "Remember Pearl Harbor," the same as our grandparents before us remembered the Maine, remembered the Alamo. It is a rallying cry for American workers and the poor to arm themselves to protect American capitalism and to help expand capitalism throughout the world.

When I try to remember my part in Pearl Harbor, it seems a really bad dream. On Saturday, the day before, we had the Admiral's inspection of the entire fleet, and that left all of us sailors pleased and tired....

After breakfast I went down to the deck below to the mess hall to read. I had been there just a few minutes when the boatswain's mate sounded General Quarters alarm: "This is not a drill. Man your battle stations." The first bomb hit our ship. It came through the mess hall, killing the chief master-at-arms.

I ran out, and as I crossed the well deck, a plane strafed us. The red tracers hit and jumped back into the air, spinning and dancing before my eyes. Then I entered a long passageway leading to the aft part of the ship and to my gun station. As I came out of the passage-way another bomb hit the ship and exploded in the carpenter's shop below.

The next thing I remember was when the fighting had ended. I remember seeing blood on the shells, and we were trying to find out where the blood was coming from. Our third shell man had lost his fingers. He was only 17 years old....

Forty-four months later the war ended, but the big change in my attitude didn't come until the Korean War. I was sent to a ship moored in Japan. I went there to bring it back into commission, and I was in charge of a crew of Japanese workers. One young fellow was wearing a jacket which had some Japanese lettering on it. I asked him what the words were, and he told me it said "the Kamikaze." He had worn the jacket as a suicide pilot in World War II, though he never did have to fly. The war ended and that saved him. I told him how stupid I thought that was, to fly a plane into a ship and blow himself up along with it. He asked me, if it was the Japanese navy off the coast of California bombing the cities of the West Coast, what would I do?

I began to think for myself for the first time. I asked him, did he come from a poor family or was his family well off? He said his dad was a worker and poor. For the first time I began to see the war as a capitalist war, and working people and the poor on both sides killing each other and doing the dying while the capitalists and their children were protected and got rich.

Fifty years later we see the capitalists on the losing side, Japan, winning out economically over the capitalists on the American winning side. It's not just that the American capitalists don't like this, but also that the rulers are looking...to turn workers' attention away from blaming our own rulers and the capitalist system for the misery right now in our lives--no jobs, no health care, no toys for our kids for Christmas.

I see these big doings over remembering Pearl Harbor as a rallying call by the American capitalists to the American workers to save them from the capitalists of Japan--that is, work harder, don't complain, and when you do complain, make sure you blame the Japanese. And when this country decides to go to war, as it did against Iraq, and bomb cities and bury soldiers alive with bulldozers, shoveling them into the sand--don't even think that there might be something wrong or inhuman about that.

I am not saying that one capitalist is better than the other capitalist, because the capitalists in each country are the enemy of their own people. This whole system is inhuman. We're still living in what Marx called the "pre-history of humanity."

Taken from THE REVOLUTIONARY JOURNALISM OF FELIX MARTIN (ISAAC WOODS).