Pearl Harbor attack initiated war that reshaped New Mexico

 Imposing headlines blazed across the top of the Dec. 8, 1941, Albuquerque Journal, reporting the devastating Japanese attack the day before on the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

Another story high up on the Journal’s front page that day told how members of New Mexico’s National Guard, as well as Air Force units that had been stationed in Albuquerque, were in the war zone in the Philippines.

...A month after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese invaded the Philippines, launching the Battle of Bataan, which would continue until American and Filipino troops were forced to surrender on April 9, 1942.

Among those battling the Japanese on the Bataan Peninsula were more than 1,800 New Mexicans, state guardsmen serving in the 200th Coast Artillery and the 515th Coast Artillery. Killed in the fighting or captured and subjected to a harsh captivity, fewer than half of these New Mexicans survived the war.

Fast-forward to July 16, 1945, and the detonation of the first atomic bomb at Trinity Site on what is now New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range.

New Mexico and its residents were in the thick of the fight from start to finish.

...But likely, especially with the recent release of the movie “Oppenheimer,” about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, New Mexico will be thought of by most as the state in which the weapons that ended the war were developed.

Oppenheimer directed the Manhattan Project, which created the atomic bombs, at Los Alamos. And, as mentioned earlier, the first atomic bomb was exploded during a test in New Mexico.

Because of that, a state that was mostly rural in 1941, with many of its slightly more than 500,000 people living without electricity, indoor plumbing and paved roads, is now home to nuclear research facilities — Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque.

World War II’s fighting never reached New Mexico, but the state was changed forever when the attack on Pearl Harbor ushered the United States into the war 82 years ago.

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