‘Pearl Harbor-USS Oklahoma: The Final Story’ Review: A Date That Will Live in Infamy On the 75th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks, PBS looks at one of the doomed ships By Dorothy Rabinowitz
http://www.wsj.com/articles/pearl-harbor-uss-oklahoma-the-final-story-review-a-date-that-will-live-in-infamy-1479422961
For the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor PBS provides a powerhouse of a film about the USS Oklahoma, one of the U.S. ships and their crews caught off guard in Battleship Row as the Japanese launched their surprise attack of Dec. 7, 1941. It was, as the American president memorably told the nation the next day, a date that would live in infamy. He did not predict, though it would turn out to be the case, that no Dec. 7 would, after Pearl Harbor, ever again feel quite like an ordinary day for countless Americans. It had brought the attack that ignited a towering rage in a people still largely disposed to neutrality in 1941, and had made it a nation ready heart and soul to go to war.
The attack on the Oklahoma, which quickly capsized, is told in part by survivors whose eyewitness accounts come with a haunting clarity. Sailors had to decide whether to jump 50 feet into waters ablaze with burning fuel, after the order came to abandon ship. Many who jumped burned to death, or were killed by Japanese strafing them as they struggled in the water. The Oklahoma lost 429 men, among them those left trapped in the ship.
The Japanese had come well armed for success with their strike force of carriers, battleships, destroyers, tankers and 400 planes, not to mention ingeniously devised special torpedoes that could function, devastatingly, in waters as shallow as those surrounding Battleship Row—a possibility the U.S. Navy had not imagined.
The Japanese planners believed, one of the historians interviewed for the film notes, that destroying these ships, each named after an American state and symbolizing American prestige, would deal a blow from which the U.S. would not soon recover. The documentary captures, tellingly, the thinking of the Japanese command, the jubilation of the attackers. In this story of one American ship, of men who had joined the Navy in Depression-era America and landed in a paradise-like Hawaii filled with sun and hyacinths until it all ended in smoke and flames, there is history of a rare kind—raw, immediate, and perfectly reflective of the day it commemorates.
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