Remembering Pearl Harbor

If anything, it encouraged me to take a more active role.”

Paul Glasgow

Three years before enlisting, a then 15-year-old Paul Glasgow remembered listening to the New York Giants football game on the afternoon of Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941. A longtime member of the American Legion Lawrence-Cedarhurst Post 339, Glasgow, 90, served in the Army Air Corps. during World War II from 1944 to 1946 in Georgetown, British Guiana. 

“If anything, it encouraged me to take a more active role,” he said, of wanting to participate in WWII once the U.S. became involved. The morning attack on America’s naval base at Pearl Harbor near Honolulu, Hawaii lasted approximately two hours. Japanese fighter planes killed more than 2,000 American soldiers and sailors, wounded 1,000 and destroyed about 20 naval vessels and 300 airplanes. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with a majority of Congress’ approval, declared war on Japan the following day. 

In reference to the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Glasgow said it is a memorial to the tragedy that America suffered. “To me, it’s a personal scar,” he said.

“Everybody was all up in arms,” Pat Polifrone, 88, of Woodmere, said, “Nobody expected it,” of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He remembers being 12 and hearing about the attack on his way home from his great uncle’s house in Jersey City. Polifrone, who is also a member of Post 339, served in the army from 1950 to 1952 during the Korean War. 

“I was one of the lucky ones,” he said, of remaining stateside after he was drafted, unlike those who were sent overseas. He added that the Japanese fighters left America with nothing to fight with except for a couple of aircraft carriers that were out at sea when Pearl Harbor was attacked. “That’s what kept us afloat,” he said.