In the space of less than two hours the Japanese surprise attack on Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, that abruptly forced us into the Second World War destroyed the greater part of the United States’ Pacific fleet along with most of our military aircraft – all at virtually no discernible cost to the raiders. For dubious reasons of “security” almost everything we had by way of defensive firepower had been compressed into a more readily-guarded area of less than one-quarter square mile, our capital ships bunched together at anchorage, neat row upon row of fighter planes tied down wingtip to wingtip on the tarmac. The Japanese had neither to take aim nor evasive action. They just had to show up.

     At 8:05 a.m., December 7, 1941, quite a number of them did, laying to rest the fantastic but widely held belief that Japanese aircraft were fragile pieces of junk and the Japanese race too inherently nearsighted to operate them effectively.

     We still had a formidable air and sea task force stationed in the Philippines under the command of the famously infallible General Douglas MacArthur. But the morning of December 8th the General apparently had not got around to his breakfast copy of the Manila Morning Post, its front page blanketed with yesterday’s Pearl Harbor debacle. As a consequence, several hours later when the Japanese arrived in force to eat MacArthur’s lunch they were baffled to find his ships and aircraft crowded together exactly as they’d been configured in Hawaii. These were all quickly dispatched as comprehensively as their counterparts of the day before.

     In short, it took the Japanese scarcely more than a day to turn the Pacific and its environs into an exclusive Japanese lake. The whole of their armed forces could now splash about, fly around, or march hither and yon happily doing whatever they wished, wherever, whenever, and unopposed. And this they proceeded to do.

     We were not the only ones shocked by these events. The Japanese were themselves staggered by both the magnitude and ease of their triumph. Their problem? The annihilation of America’s Pacific combat capacity was a tough strategic act to follow. What martial blow, however devastating, could equal let alone surpass their war-winning achievements of December?

     Needless to say, our own strategic planners were giving some thought to the same question:
Where were targets of such importance as to draw the Japanese into a repeat performance? (Only this time we hoped to be there to greet them.)

     It was in the course of these extensive countrywide, multi-agency, occasionally histrionic discussions that the Bronx Board of Education, deploying reasoning comprehensible only to those with an active teaching certificate, divined that my first alma mater, Elementary P.S. 91, could well be on the fiendish Japanese target list and this Board was not about to replicate the gross negligence shown in Hawaii nor repeat MacArthur’s criminal insouciance in the Philippines. Accordingly, funding intended for 1) replenishing pencils and paperclips, 2) reducing class size, and 3) fixing the leaky toilets in the boys’ bathroom was now redirected to turning P.S. 91 into the Gibraltar of the Bronx.

     Vulnerable pacifist cement pillars holding the roof aloft were replaced with steel thought to be far more combative. Windowpanes were replaced by shatterproof, chicken-wire-embedded glass. (The thinking was that even were the entirety of P.S. 91 reduced to rubble, you could still peer through these now indestructible windows to see if your kids were trapped underneath.) Thus, almost the entirety of my elementary school education was informed by rarely hearing what teachers were saying over the incessant din of hammers and saws.

     It took a battalion of elderly workers four cacophonous years but by the summer of 1945, just as World War II ended, the now impregnable P.S. 91 was ready for the long-anticipated Japanese onslaught. And indeed, as predicted, it began in earnest shortly thereafter when a few blocks from the school, the first Toyota dealership opened its doors on the Bronx’s Grand Concourse, right across from the now doomed Packard Motor Car Company.

     Years later, Ivy League academicians whose medical deferrals during the war for reasons of flat feet, bunions, and sprained ankles (elevating podiatry to a medical specialty) gave them a unique perspective on military strategy, expressed doubts as to whether converting an old, rickety school building thousands of miles from Tokyo into an impregnable fortress had been the best use of scarce resources. Defenders of the Board’s action vigorously responded that whatever the cost, “our children’s safety was paramount”. By making P.S. 91 such a manifestly hardened target the Japanese could readily see the futility of taking it on.

     They were right. As a consequence of their brisk, defensive posture, not one bomb fell on the school during the course of the war, nor did a single suspicious aircraft requiring the home guard to shoot it down ever appear overhead – though I understand the Goodyear Blimp may have had a close call. Brutally destructive as the war had been, thanks to the farsighted perspicacity of the Bronx School Board, I graduated without so much as a scratch. It was my subsequent peacetime years of education that were to prove traumatic.

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