nted by the University of Nevada, Reno (USA). For two decades, his work has focused on research and consulting on public policies (citizenship abroad and return), diasporas and new technologies, and social and historical memory (oral history, migration and exile), with special emphasis on the Basque case. He is the author of more than twenty publications. He has authored the blog “Basque Identity 2.0” by EITB and “Diaspora Bizia” by EuskalKultura.eus. On Twitter @Oiarzabal.
Josu M. Aguirregabiria is a researcher and founder of the Sancho de Beurko Association and is currently its president. A specialist in the Civil War in Álava, he is the author of several publications related to this topic, among which “La batalla de Villarreal de Álava” (2015) y “Seis días de guerra en el frente de Álava. Comienza la ofensiva de Mola” (2018) stand out.
Japan aspired to be the leader of a new political order in Asia at the cost of seizing the British, French, Dutch, and American colonial territories, and thus extending, without hindrance, its influence in the rest of Southeast Asia. And as such it was recognized by the western powers of Germany and Italy through the Tripartite Pact of September 27, 1940. Previously, after the fall of France into the hands of Nazi Germany, Japan had invaded French Indochina (Vietnam) on September 22, 1940. As a reaction, the US suspended all exports to Japan, including oil, which accounted for 80% of the total obtained by the country of the Rising Sun. The situation was critical and the only solution was to neutralize the US on its way to the Dutch East Indies, which held significant oil reserves that could feed its insatiable war economy.
Some thirty ships, including six aircraft carriers with 420 aircraft on board, and 16,000 men from the Imperial Navy of Japan, crossed about 5,600 kilometers (3,500 miles) of the Pacific Ocean, undetected, with the aim of ending the meddling of the United States with a preventative attack that would theoretically mean the end of its fleet on the West Coast .
Without warning, on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, Japan launched 353 aircraft from its carriers in two waves of attacks. These air raids were supported by two heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, two battleships, eleven destroyers, and 35 submarines. Within just a few hours, Wake Island, in the US, was in turn also razed. On Wake Island, there were seven Basque-American workers, hired by the Morrison-Knudsen engineering company of Boise, Idaho, who were paradoxically building military defenses against a possible Japanese attack.
The American defenses of Pearl Harbor, taken by surprise, offered little resistance to the incessant aerial bombardments. Barring extraordinary instances of heroism, American military and civilians were stunned bystanders of the chaos and catastrophe unleashed by the Japanese. Their placid lives had turned into a nightmare. They had unwittingly become historical witnesses to the unwanted involvement of the United States in the Second World War (WWII). Among them we have been able to identify six people of Basque origin who experienced it first hand. They are Mary Sala, the brothers Fermín and Alfonso Aldecoa Arriandiaga, Leandro Urcelay Llantada, Gregorio “George” Ascuena Monasterio, and Domingo Amuchastegui Guenaga.
Mary Sala, born in 1920 in Ely, Nevada, to a Nafarroan father and a Quebecer mother, who died when Mary was 6 months old. Unfortunately her father died in 1928, leaving her and her older brother, John, orphans at only 8 and 10 years old. Without a relative, the authorities decided to send them to an orphanage in Ogden, Utah. Fortunately, a neighbor in Ely, the Behe Nafarroan Catherine Mong Bercetche, married at the time to another Behe Nafarroan Louis Harriett (they will later separate), decided to adopt them and raise them together with her other two children, Emile Josephine and Louis Genty “Shanty.” It would be at the University of Nevada, in Reno, from where she will later graduate, where Mary met her future husband Mitchell Anton Cobeaga Laca, born in 1917 in Lo