All Intensive Purposes

Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1941:

War came to us with the ball in Brooklyn's possession on the Giants' forty-five-yard line. "Japanese bombs have fallen on Hawaii and the Philippine Islands," a hurried voice broke in to announce. "Keep tuned to this station for further details. We now return you to the Polo Grounds." No more than that. Twisting the dial, we got other voices: a cheerful voice singing the tune of "Jingle Bells" but different words ("Oh, have you seen those bridal suites at Busch's something stores?"), a sprightly voice crying "Listen, America! We bring you good news!," a courteous voice that wished to thank somebody for relinquishing fifteen minutes to Armageddon.

Gradually all the voices -- in reality, one voice, the placid, rather foolish voice of America on Sunday afternoon -- took up the incredible story from the Pacific. It came in slowly -- disjointed, fragmentary, contradicting itself now and then. A man in a private plane over Diamond Head, just flying for fun, shot down by two planes coming in from the sea with the Rising Sun on their wings; Japanese parachute troops dropping on the beach at Waikiki; three hundred and fifty men killed by a direct hit on the barracks at Hickam Field, and a ship capsized and burning in Pearl Harbor; a transport loaded with lumber torpedoed and sunk a thousand miles west of San Francisco; an unidentified ship, probably an aircraft carrier, shelling the forts at Honolulu; fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty planes bombing Oahu; and all over this country -- in Washington, New York, San Francisco, Dallas -- the commentators talking rapidly but evasively, not yet knowing what to say about a catastrophe as sudden and preposterous as something contrived by Orson Welles, not yet able to believe that war had at last made the full circle of the world on Sunday morning.

"The Talk of the Town," The New Yorker 19 (Dec. 13, 1941). If I'm not mistaken, this was written by Wolcott Gibbs.

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