Read Online Goodbye, Darkness by William Manchester - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: William Manchester
Tags: BIO008000
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V-J days, we agree, have been outmaneuvered, outsold, and outsmarted by the vanquished.
My own feeling the next morning is that whoever is in charge here has appalling taste. This is a community of honky-tonks. High-rise condominiums, uncannily like Puerto Rico's, have put the famous beaches northwest of Diamond Head in perpetual shade. Aiea Heights Hospital, where I once lay with thousands of other Marine casualties from Iwo and Okinawa, has been razed and replaced by CINCPAC headquarters, but the military seems no longer able to correct pernicious practices of civilian tradesmen. On Hotel Street electric guitars are turned up to incredible sound levels. Aloha shirts are offered at preposterous prices. Muscular transvestites accost you under a marquee which bears the announcement boys will be girls . Prostitution is illegal, but the bars and strip joints on Hotel Street are crowded with hookers who, if a man pauses within arm's reach, will caress his crotch with a gentle squeeze. There are more massage parlors, strip joints, and pornographic shops than cafés. Signs ballyhoo double-bedrooman-tics! male-female sexantics! watch oral sex live ! Japan's December 7 raid thirty-eight years ago was an outrage, but one feels that the destruction of Honolulu's tenderloin would be less outrageous today.
The route followed by the Japanese fliers that long-ago Sunday may be traced with some precision. Kolekole Pass, overlooking Schofield Barracks, is a quiet canyon in the steep mountains; one hears no roaring planes there now, only the rustling of leaves in a soft breeze and the murmur of high-tension wires. The barracks below are virtually unaltered since James Jones wrote of them in
From Here to Eternity:
the quadrangles, the orange buildings, the banyans are redolent of Jones's tale, though they are more sparsely populated; where twenty-five thousand soldiers were based at Schofield in 1941, there are fewer than four thousand today. No scars of the raid are visible here. To find them, one must drive to Hickam Field — where strafers' .50-caliber bullets are still embedded in a peach-colored concrete wall — and, of course, to the harbor itself.
Historical shrines often become diminished by mundane surroundings. One thinks of Saint Peter's in Rome and Boston's Bunker Hill. Still, it is jarring, when driving to the port where the United States entered World War II, to find a prosaic green-and-white freeway sign, exactly like those on the American mainland, directing drivers to:
90 EAST
PEARL HARBOR
Following it, and instructions phoned to me at the Halekulani by CINCPAC, I come to a naval complex of moors and piers, fringed by palms warped by millennia of offshore winds. Elsewhere commercial launches leave hourly for tours of the harbor, but I am booked on a military VIP junket. Judging by my fellow passengers, almost anyone can be a VIP. There are young boys in T-shirts chewing bubble gum; middle-aged, hennaed, hairnetted women; gross men in riotous aloha shirts. They all seem to be carrying Polaroids or Instamatics. A pretty blonde, whose parents must have been teenagers, if not younger, at the time of the great attack here, appears wearing a petty officer's rating chevrons and calls us to order. Before we leave, she says, we are going to see a short motion picture. She leads us into a Quonset hut and the lights go down.
The movie, an NBC documentary, is suggestive of the March-of-Time style and was probably spliced from film clips shortly after the war. The narrator's voice is stentorian; the crashing score is by Richard Rodgers; there is a lot of Japanese footage captured after the war. Its chief interest is in what it omits. There isn't a single reference to U.S. bungling. Much is made of the fact that the Japs missed U.S. oil reserves, enough for two years, and dockyard repair facilities. At the end, with Rodgers's music soaring triumphantly, American warships steam out into the twilight to wreak vengeance on the deceitful
My own feeling the next morning is that whoever is in charge here has appalling taste. This is a community of honky-tonks. High-rise condominiums, uncannily like Puerto Rico's, have put the famous beaches northwest of Diamond Head in perpetual shade. Aiea Heights Hospital, where I once lay with thousands of other Marine casualties from Iwo and Okinawa, has been razed and replaced by CINCPAC headquarters, but the military seems no longer able to correct pernicious practices of civilian tradesmen. On Hotel Street electric guitars are turned up to incredible sound levels. Aloha shirts are offered at preposterous prices. Muscular transvestites accost you under a marquee which bears the announcement boys will be girls . Prostitution is illegal, but the bars and strip joints on Hotel Street are crowded with hookers who, if a man pauses within arm's reach, will caress his crotch with a gentle squeeze. There are more massage parlors, strip joints, and pornographic shops than cafés. Signs ballyhoo double-bedrooman-tics! male-female sexantics! watch oral sex live ! Japan's December 7 raid thirty-eight years ago was an outrage, but one feels that the destruction of Honolulu's tenderloin would be less outrageous today.
The route followed by the Japanese fliers that long-ago Sunday may be traced with some precision. Kolekole Pass, overlooking Schofield Barracks, is a quiet canyon in the steep mountains; one hears no roaring planes there now, only the rustling of leaves in a soft breeze and the murmur of high-tension wires. The barracks below are virtually unaltered since James Jones wrote of them in
From Here to Eternity:
the quadrangles, the orange buildings, the banyans are redolent of Jones's tale, though they are more sparsely populated; where twenty-five thousand soldiers were based at Schofield in 1941, there are fewer than four thousand today. No scars of the raid are visible here. To find them, one must drive to Hickam Field — where strafers' .50-caliber bullets are still embedded in a peach-colored concrete wall — and, of course, to the harbor itself.
Historical shrines often become diminished by mundane surroundings. One thinks of Saint Peter's in Rome and Boston's Bunker Hill. Still, it is jarring, when driving to the port where the United States entered World War II, to find a prosaic green-and-white freeway sign, exactly like those on the American mainland, directing drivers to:
90 EAST
PEARL HARBOR
Following it, and instructions phoned to me at the Halekulani by CINCPAC, I come to a naval complex of moors and piers, fringed by palms warped by millennia of offshore winds. Elsewhere commercial launches leave hourly for tours of the harbor, but I am booked on a military VIP junket. Judging by my fellow passengers, almost anyone can be a VIP. There are young boys in T-shirts chewing bubble gum; middle-aged, hennaed, hairnetted women; gross men in riotous aloha shirts. They all seem to be carrying Polaroids or Instamatics. A pretty blonde, whose parents must have been teenagers, if not younger, at the time of the great attack here, appears wearing a petty officer's rating chevrons and calls us to order. Before we leave, she says, we are going to see a short motion picture. She leads us into a Quonset hut and the lights go down.
The movie, an NBC documentary, is suggestive of the March-of-Time style and was probably spliced from film clips shortly after the war. The narrator's voice is stentorian; the crashing score is by Richard Rodgers; there is a lot of Japanese footage captured after the war. Its chief interest is in what it omits. There isn't a single reference to U.S. bungling. Much is made of the fact that the Japs missed U.S. oil reserves, enough for two years, and dockyard repair facilities. At the end, with Rodgers's music soaring triumphantly, American warships steam out into the twilight to wreak vengeance on the deceitful
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