Seventy-five years ago tomorrow The Butler Eagle published an edition dominated by local and national tragedies, as the country awaited a response to the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and a family in Prospect mourned the death of four young children in a house fire.

A day after the Japanese attack left much of America’s Pacific fleet in ruins, readers of the Butler Eagle read about America’s military response and how men from Butler County were risking their lives in the “danger zone.”

The front page, dominated by a headline proclaiming Congress had declared war at President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s urging, also featured a photo and report from a house fire near Prospect that killed four children.

Relying on wire reports from the international news agency United Press, the Eagle’s front page on Dec. 8 included stories on declarations of war against the Japanese by U.S. allies, coverage of a rumored counterassault in the Pacific against the Japanese strike force that had attacked Pearl Harbor, and reports on FDR’s iconic address on the attack. The president declared the date of the assault (Dec. 7, 1941) one that “will live in infamy,” and pledged the country, in “righteous might,” would achieve “absolute victory.”

“Always we will remember the character of the onslaught against us,” Roosevelt told Congress, according to a United Press report on the war declaration.

The Eagle’s coverage also included a front page report on Butler County men in Hawaii and the Philippines, focusing in large part on two officers — Capt. Donald C. Cubbison Jr. of Harrisville and Lt. John M. McCormick of Butler — attached to units in Hawaii.

In total, the Eagle reported, 46 men from Butler County were in Hawaii at the time of the attack, and three men were stationed in the Philippine Islands, which the paper reported had also been subjected to “heavy attacks” by Japanese forces the day before.

But the deadly Prospect fire — which had killed Lilian M. Perrine, 6, Edna J. Perrine, 6, Madeline Y. Perrine, 2, and Dorothy M. Perrine, 1, on the same day Japanese bombers killed an estimated 1,500 and injured 1,500 more — forced the paper to run photographs of the devastation in Hawaii on an interior page, where the paper also published a report on precautions being taken by the city police department.

The department said it moved to protect Butler’s industrial plants and co-opted members of VFW posts and other “overseas veterans,” to participate in an undisclosed series of precautionary steps.

The paper, in an unsigned editorial published on Page 6, called for national unity in the aftermath of the Japanese surprise attack.

“In this crisis we are all Americans, united and strong,” the editorial proclaimed. “We are determined to protect our land from attack, and we will not permit the American way of life to go down to defeat.”