Читать книгу Statecraft - Margaret Thatcher - Страница 17

Before, during and after my time as Prime Minister I have paid many visits to American military bases and other sites, but none like that which I made to the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor on the morning of 11 May 1993. A tender took us out to the ship, upon whose shattered hull a special structure has been erected. For the last forty years, the colours have been raised and lowered each day in honour of the 1177 members of the Arizona’s crew who died in the Japanese air force’s attack of 7 December 1941. Some of the bodies were recovered, but the remains of nine hundred still lie in the depths of the water that now fills the ship. Standing over a square opening that leads down to the ocean, I lowered a bouquet of flowers. The petals drifted across the surface and I thought about the sailors who died in such terrible circumstances so that the rest of us could live in peace and freedom.

The USS Arizona should not only, however, be a place of pilgrimage: it should be a place of reflection. The immediate consequence of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was, of course, to bring America into the Second World War. So it was, in that sense, the day the Axis powers began to lose. The circumstances of the attack swung an earlier sceptical American opinion behind the war effort. ‘Remember Pearl Harbor’ became the title of America’s most popular war song. Those words should also serve as a warning to us.

On that Sunday morning sixty years ago, just before eight o’clock, 353 Japanese aircraft began their devastating attack. Some three thousand military personnel were killed or wounded, eight battleships and ten other naval vessels were sunk or badly damaged, and almost two hundred US aircraft were destroyed in the space of just three hours. What made the attack on Pearl Harbor so shocking was the fact that it was entirely unexpected. Tension between America and Japan had been rising. But there was no suspicion of what the Japanese were planning and there had been no declaration of war. The inquiries launched after the event found that errors had been made by the US naval and army commanders in the Hawaii region. But the fact remains that what happened at Pearl Harbor reflected far more broadly on the unpreparedness of America for an attack coming (literally) ‘out of the blue’.

The colours raised over the Arizona on the day of my visit were given to me when I left by the Commander-in-Chief of the US Pacific Fleet. They are now framed in my office in London. They serve as a constant reminder. What troubles me, however, is that America and her allies now face a similar threat, and we have been doing too little to guard against it.