The Pearl Harbor Problem

The Pearl Harbor Problem

Chance, a word or a minor sign, a dream, not  brilliance,  is the usual origin of discovery.  You happen upon a sign, and yoy fall into an unknown. As it happened on a hot summer day in  Ottawa, Canada,  in 1961, not long after I and my parents and two young siblings arrived from Zweibrücken, Germany, where my RCAF officer father had completed a four-year posting at the Canadian fighter base there. We had recently returned to the family home on Cunningham Avenue, in the tranquil suburb of Alta Vista, and, in a manner of speaking,  I, young boy as I was, without warning, was brushed by a black-winged bird  from the past, the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor of the 7th of December, 1941.

Pearl Harbor. For the United States, the beginning of the War in the Pacific, and her entrance to the War in Europe, the worst war in human history, that would take  sixty  million or more lives.

Of course,  I that day in Ottawa, innocent boy that I was, I had no idea that I was about to be introduced to the true story of Pearl Harbor, and  its beginning,  a mystery of which even now, decades later, the world has no knowledge.