The Poems of Lt. Henry Lee: A Soldier's Answer to Pearl Harbor

"Remember Dec. 7th!", a Second World War poster.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, brought the United States into the Second World War and left no American untouched. Lt. Henry Lee, a twenty-seven-year-old Army officer serving in the Philippines, answered in verse.

Two men and the Philippines

Lee and Dwight Eisenhower probably never met, but they shared a link. Eisenhower had served in the Philippines from 1935 to 1939 on the staff of General Douglas MacArthur, learning lessons about the islands and the Pacific that became vital to the U.S. war effort in December 1941. Days after Pearl Harbor he was called to Washington to help shape the American response. Pearl Harbor changed his life, as it did Lee's.

"Prayer Before Battle (To Mars)"

Lee, from Pasadena, California, was an amateur poet who kept a journal of verse about life, beauty and much else. He reached the Philippines in late 1940 and was first assigned to the 12th MP Company of the 31st Infantry. After the attack he knew he would soon be in mortal combat with the Japanese forces nearby, and on December 8, 1941, far from home and family, he turned to his verse.

The poem, a sonnet, is addressed to Mars, the god of war. Its speaker kneels before the war god, frightened and alone. The gentle faith he would rather follow deserts him in the face of war, and, emptied of belief, he turns to Mars as his lord. He does not ask to survive, since he already counts his life as lost, nor to be protected from harm; he asks only for the strength to meet whatever comes, and, so that the war and his own death will mean something, for the ability to hate.

What became of him

Lee survived the Bataan Death March and became a prisoner at the Cabanatuan POW camp, where he kept writing in secret. As liberating forces drew near, the Japanese shipped him and other prisoners to Japan aboard "hell ships", unmarked freighters exposed to American air attack. Before leaving, Lee buried his poems, hoping to recover them one day. His first ship was sunk; the survivors were moved to another, the Enoura Maru, which was sunk in the straits of Formosa on January 9, 1945. Lee was killed and buried there in an unmarked grave.

After the Philippines were retaken, his buried book of poems was found and returned to his parents, who had a small edition printed in his memory in 1948, "Nothing But Praise." It was reprinted in a limited run in 1985 for the 40th anniversary of victory in the Philippines. The article's author thinks it deserves wider publication, for its history and its poetry, and closes by recalling the wish that such dead "shall not have died in vain."

Sources

• National Park Service, Eisenhower National Historic Site, "Remembering the 'Date Which Will Live In Infamy': The Poems of Lt. Henry Lee." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/remembering-the-date-which-will-live-in-infamy-the-poems-of-lt-henry-lee.htm
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.