Americans overwhelmingly wanted no part of WWII. Isolationist organizations like Charles Lindbergh’s America First Committee argued that Europe’s catastrophe under Hitler and Asia’s imperial conflicts were tragic, but not our problem. That sentiment may have prevailed, if not for Pearl Harbor.

In the 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora!, Japanese Admiral Yamamoto says after the Pearl Harbor attack, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” The famous line is a Hollywood invention; what Yamamoto actually said was less poetical but more harrowing: “A military man can scarcely pride himself on having ‘smitten a sleeping enemy’... angered and outraged, he will soon launch a determined counterattack.”

The sleeping giant line persists in the American mythos because it’s true: our species—not just Americans, all of us—can be slow to anger collectively, but we can be overwhelming once provoked. Push us hard enough, and we will eventually push back.

In August 1944, B-29 pilot Maj. Claude Hensinger was forced to bail out over occupied China. He saved his parachute—a lifesaving object designed for the instant when everything else has failed. When he proposed to his wife three years later, he offered his parachute rather than a ring, transmuting the object of his survival into a symbol of new life. The nylon that had spared his life and warmed him through a dangerous night became the same fabric that resolutely wrapped his bride, and all their hopes to begin again.

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Links:

• Parachute Wedding Dress in the National Museum of American History

  
  

• “The Heartwarming Story Behind WWII Wedding Dress Made From Parachute,” by Phillys Brown, The History Insider, January 2025.

  
  

• Yamamoto's "Sleeping Giant" Quotation

  
  

• America First Committee

  
  

This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.

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