Oil Slick
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Oil Slick They say that the hull integrity of the battleship Arizona is going to fail one of these days, and that will be a disaster. She has always leaked a few drops of black oil, the stuff they used in those days. It is worse than DFM- diesel fuel marine- which is what the ships burn now. Arizona has been leaking a little since the day that she went to the bottom of placid Pearl Harbor . It wasn’t far to sink, with only a few feet between the keel and the muck. The main water line from shore to Ford Island ran there, and when the bottom of the ship was blown out, the leviathan dropped suddenly down on it, cutting off the pressure to the mains that should have provided water to the hoses down at the seaplanes hangars that blazed so fiercely. Just about everyone below decks was killed. After all, the ship was at anchor in peacetime, just preparing for Sunday holy services on the broad teak afterdeck. It is surprising, I suppose, that the tanks that were filled up so long ago still have anything in them at all. They really built those ships. The sheen that the oil produces sweeps majestically out with the tide, down past the south end of Ford Island and past Hospital Point and down the channel, past the Officer’s Club at Hickam Air Base and the point where the submarine nets once were strung. The concern is that when the tanks finally collapse, the outflow of oil will harm the environment. The effluvia from within the hull, the sludge of old paper and canvas and men, will be spread along the bottom. Impossible to clean, or wipe away like it never happened. The man on the radio this morning was kind enough to remember the men that perished that morning at Pearl Harbor ; there were 2,400 of them. But he hastened to remind me that the attack was provoked by the embargo on Japanese holdings, and the sale of scrap steel to build high-performance weapons. I am pleased by his balanced approach to reporting mass murder. It shows you just how far we have come in this world of relativism. It took a half century to get around to blaming Mr. Roosevelt for the deaths of all those young kids. It only took a few months for the wise-guys here to say that the people in the Trade Towers in New York had it coming to them. But no matter. Those that do not really understand their history will never understand their enemies, and they are more to be pitied than despised. It is still the middle of the night in Hawaii as I write here in Washington . It is already evening in Manila , on the island of Luzon in the Philippines . In the aftermath of the Spanish-American war, the Philippine Islands were ceded to the U.S. in the Treaty of Paris for $20 million. Conflict broke out almost immediately. In 1903, the first President Roosevelt directed the establishment of a military installation near Angeles City , the site of a sharp encounter with local freedom fighters. I think that is what we are supposed to call them, these days. The installation was known as Fort Stotsenburg , in honor of Col. John M. Stotsenberg who was killed on April 23, 1899 in a battle in Bulacan province. In 1920, an air base was opened on the fort, named after Major Harold Clark of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, who was stationed in the P.I., but died in a seaplane crash in the Panama Canal Zone in 1919. Born in Minnesota and raised in Manila , he was the first American to fly in Hawaii . I liked going to Clark, and I liked Angeles City , back in the day. It had a different feel to it than the hurly-burly of Olongapo City . A little more refined, if you can apply that term to a place that had a district near the gate nick-named Air Start Ally. Clark was a little eerie. The quaint colonial bungalows under the banyan trees had a secret history, having been occupied by Japanese airmen for nearly four years. You see, by the 6th of December, the Japanese had assembled about five hundred fighters and bombers at airbases on Formosa to conduct their aerial assault on the Philippines . The mission was to support a seaborne invasion by destroying the United States Far East Air Force long-range bombers concentrated at Clark, and establish air superiority over Luzon . The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was scheduled for 8:00 a.m. on the 7th (Hawaii time). Due to the time zones, though, and the Date Line, the attack on Pearl Harbor would occur at 2:30 a.m. on the 8th in Manila . The Japanese had planned for their bombers and fighters to begin taking off from Formosa at that hour, intending to be over their targets at dawn. But they expected stiff resistance to meet them, since surprise would be impossible. The Philippines would already know that the war had begun. The Commander was a man named Douglas MacArthur, a retired Chief of Staff of the Army, who had been named the Field Marshall of the Philippine Islands. He failed to place his forces on full war alert, and no one alive knows why. Clark was evacuated on Christmas Eve, and the whole of Luzon surrendered not long after. The man I heard on the radio this morning did not mention the Death March that happened after that. I suppose that is because there is not relativism in it. MacArthur was lucky to survive with his reputation intact. The Commanders in Hawaii were not so lucky. Admiral Kimmel and General Short were both cashiered for their failure to anticipate the inevitable. Kimmel was watching the attack from his office in Macalapa Crater when a spent round came through the window and bounced off his chest. He looked around, and said he wished it had killed him. It would have been better that way, he thought, than what was going to happen to him. But MacArthur’s incompetence and Kimmel’s failure are not what this day is about. It is about the kids they led, and particularly about the ones that died so long ago. I feel an obligation to remember them. They were all around us in the P.I., and of course, in Hawaii . I have paid my respects in person, and it is a long way to go to go back. I hope to get to it one of these days, before the rest of the oil spills out of the Arizona . Perhaps I’ll go, if I ever get to retire. But is one of those curious things about the old days. Both Colonel Stotsenburg and Major Clark are buried in Arlington National Cemetery , just down the road. I may stop by today, or maybe tomorrow, when the world exploded in the Philippines . Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra www.vicsocotra.com |
