The similarities are painfully obvious — two unprovoked early morning attacks that left thousands dead and a nation bowed but not broken.

The list of parallels between the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that took place Dec. 7, 1941, and the terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon in Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, doesn’t end there. And while there certainly are differences, most notably in the history that unfolded following each attack, the obvious similarities have provided fodder for study among historians, political scientists, military experts — and those who lived through both of them.

Count Don Weiland among the latter.

Weiland, who turns 97 next month, was 15 years old and living in Oakland Township when he heard the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — an attack that killed 2,403 U.S. personnel and left the U.S. Pacific fleet in shambles.

“I thought, ‘What’s the matter with this world?” Weiland recalled recently from his home in Butler. “I was just a young boy. We thought it was terrible.”

While the attack caught those stationed at the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor by surprise, Weiland was not shocked when he heard the news on his family’s radio.

“We knew the Japanese had sided with Adolph Hitler,” he said. “And we figured if they were siding with Adolph Hitler, they were bound to do something. And they did.”

Tensions between the U.S. and Japan had been ratcheting up for weeks. Indeed, the two countries were involved in talks that, ostensibly, were geared toward reaching a peaceful settlement that would cover the Pacific region. The Pittsburgh Press, in its Dec. 5, 1941 edition, reported progress had been made in those talks and it was “hoped that negotiations can continue toward seeking a ‘common formula’ for a solution of the Pacific crisis.”

But the hopes of finalizing any such formula disappeared when more than 350 Japanese aircraft took off from four aircraft carriers, and shortly before 9 a.m. Dec. 7 began wreaking havoc on the U.S. Pacific fleet, destroying or damaging 19 ships and 325 aircraft.

Weiland said his parents didn’t offer anything in the way of a reaction after they learned what happened that morning on the island of Oahu.

“They didn’t say a word,” he said. “But I do remember one neighbor had his ear up to the radio all the time, listening to what was going on. He was really concerned.”

At 15, Weiland was too young to take any meaningful action — yet. He would go on to serve in the latter stages of the war; he was on a troop ship on his way to Japan when the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

But the attack on Pearl Harbor immediately mobilized thousands of young — and some not-so-young — men, sending them to military recruitment offices in droves before the end of that night. The Pittsburgh Press reported those who came to offer their services did so with “no tub thumping, no shouting, no wisecracks — just an air of quiet, grim determination.”

Among those volunteering at a U.S. Marines recruiting station in downtown Pittsburgh was 45-year-old George C. Gerhold, a veteran of World War I who, despite being married and the father of three, was willing to make the sacrifice.

Gerhold ultimately was told he was too old — at least for the time being. “Maybe later,” the recruiting officer told him, “we can take you.”

A disappointed Gerhold, who fought in the Argonne and on the Meuse with the 28th Division in the Great War (World War I), said he simply wanted to do his part after hearing about Pearl Harbor. ”

Japan has declared war and as an American I would like to help give it back to them,” he said.

It wasn’t just in Pittsburgh that men were responding that way. In New York, the Navy recruiting offices had to close shortly after noon on Dec. 8 when enlistments were running more than twice as high as they did on the first day of World War I in 1917. In St. Louis, enlistments increased tenfold while Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and other large cities reported record enlistments.

Even those a little too young wanted to do their part. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Robert R. Hagy Jr. reported that in the Mount Lebanon section of Pittsburgh, a young boy — after listening to radio bulletins at his breakfast table — told his mother to forget about the sled, the bicycle and other toys that were on his Christmas list.

“All I want now,” the boy said, “is a machine gun.”

The terrorist attacks that took place on Sept. 11, 2001, spurred young men and women to find the nearest recruiting station. In the 12 months following the attacks, more than 181,000 enlisted in active-duty service and nearly 73,000 more joined the reserves, according to uso.org.

Some specifically pointed to the 9/11 terrorist attacks as the main reason they enlisted. Army Maj. Tatchie Manso was a 20-year-old college student working seven blocks from the World Trade Center when the attacks occurred. Manso said he never considered joining the military until that fateful day.

“It was at that moment I realized that there was something I needed to be part of that was greater than myself,” he said in a story published on uso.org.

That desire to help one’s country in the aftermath of an attack was one of the biggest similarities between the two catastrophic events that took place nearly 60 years apart. A series of man-on-the-street interviews in Washington captured on tape for the Library of Congress on Dec. 8, 1941, showed many young men eager to serve.

“It hit me pretty bad,” Norman Wiseman told interviewers Alan Lomax and Phillip Cohen regarding his reaction to the Pearl Harbor attack. “I was expecting something to happen, but when it did come along, it surprised me. I wasn’t expecting it so soon. I feel I’ll be called into the draft pretty soon. I believe the U.S. will eventually win out. But if we do defeat Japan, it’s not going to be the end. We have to finish off the other Axis powers before anything is settled.”

A number of others expressed nearly identical feelings — shocked at the suddenness of the attack, but at the same time not exactly surprised. “I thought something was going to happen sooner or later,” one young man said. “But it did surprise me that it happened while the Japanese people were here negotiating.”

The Sept. 11 attacks seemed to come much more out of the blue, given there was no armed conflict that involved numerous nations, as there was in December 1941.

Chester Miller, 77, of Bon Air, told a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter on Sept. 11 that when he turned the television on and saw what was happening, “I was shocked.

“I think this is worse than Pearl Harbor,” added Miller, who was a Navy Seabee in World War II. “I still can’t believe it.”

Stuart Fox, who was an 18-year-old student at Carnegie Mellon University, reacted in a similar fashion. “How could somebody do this to the United States?” he asked. “How could a plane hit the Pentagon? That’s the most secure air space in the world, isn’t it? It makes me want to go out and join the Army.”

The notion that someone — the nation of Japan in the case of Pearl Harbor, and a terrorist organization in the case of the Sept. 11 attacks — could attack the U.S. on its home soil was a difficult thing to come to grasp, said Jeffrey Bloodworth, a history professor and co-director of the School of Public Service and Global Affairs at Gannon University in Erie.

Bloodworth said that for most of its history, the U.S. always had what he called “free security” in the form of friendly neighbors to the north and south and oceans to the east and west.

“It was one of our great geopolitical blessings,” he said. “We haven’t had to worry about foreign incursions as many nations have. But (Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11) were two examples of that free security being punctured. It was a real shock to America’s security, and it had a profound effect on America’s psyche because the assumption created by history was that Americans had come to expect that attacks on the homeland just don’t happen.

“It was a puncturing of American innocence.”

Another similarity between Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11, Bloodworth said, was the “immediate rallying to the flag, in the sense that we have a common enemy.” Prior to Pearl Harbor, Bloodworth said, there was a strong noninterventionist impulse among both parties, but especially Republicans.

“And Pearl Harbor just annihilated that,” he said. “The noninterventionists became utterly irrelevant overnight.”

The same was true with 9/11, Bloodworth said, noting that there was only one vote in the House of Representatives against the use of military force. “Even the quite left liberal political figures and magazines felt that this war made sense,” Bloodworth said.

One major difference, though, between the two attacks is what happened in the aftermath.

“After Pearl Harbor, American goes into World War II and comes out more politically united than ever,” Bloodworth said. “It was probably the high point of American political life of having a real national consensus both domestically and in terms of foreign policy. There were disagreements, of course, but we were living in a golden age.”

The same couldn’t be said in the aftermath of the Global War on Terror, however.

Alan Levy, a retired history professor at Slippery Rock University, said both events gave Franklin D. Roosevelt and George W. Bush — the U.S. presidents at the time — “a fairly united group of countries that were ready to move forward with American leadership.” But in the case of the post-9/11 era, Bush couldn’t maintain that momentum for very long, Levy said.

“Many students of foreign policy in the early 21st century would think to some degree at least, Bush had a potential linkup with various other nations — the British, the French — that he didn’t nurture as well as he could have, that he didn’t take advantage of whatever support he got and didn’t feel the need to do much more than act on his own,” Levy said. “The result, within about two years, is the potential support and unity of cause internationally against terrorism was not much stronger than it had been before.”

Levy said it’s difficult to compare the man-on-the-street reactions to Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11 because the attackers were so different.

“I think the average American after Pearl Harbor pretty much felt that no matter what their feelings were before, this was a cause that everyone had to get behind. It would be a long and difficult journey, but one that had to be seen to its end. Whereas with 9/11, it was more a matter of trying to assess what the meaning of the attack was. Everyone knew there was some meaning there, but the answers were still quite varied.”

Among those looking for answers was Peter Talleri. The Butler native held the rank of U.S. Marine Corps colonel and was in the “war fighting” headquarters of Gen. Tommy Franks, in Tampa, Fla., on the morning of Sept. 11. The television was on in a meeting room and when reports of the first plane crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center were broadcast, he and the others took notice.

“Obviously that got our attention, but no one under any circumstances would believe that our country was being attacked,” Talleri said. “When the second plane hit, the meeting was over.”

Immediately, Talleri said, he and the others began preparing for war. What clinched it, he said, is when Bush mentioned the “axis of evil” in his State of the Union address some five months later.

“When he did that, it confirmed that he had identified an enemy,” Talleri said, “and we knew were likely going to war somewhere.”

Although there certainly were differences between Pearl Harbor and 9/11 — and the aftermath of both — Talleri said he puts 9/11 “in the same exact box” as the earlier attack on the U.S.

“Our nation was attacked,” said Talleri, who retired in 2013 as a major general after 34 years in the Marine Corps. “It was a horrendous attack, and our country ran to the sounds of guns to serve our nation and do the right thing to protect ourselves and our allies.

“It was very similar — just a different time.”

But several people who lived through both events — Weiland, Lou Snodgrass and Robert Artkowsky — didn’t see the same parallels that Talleri saw between the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“It was altogether different,” said Snodgrass, 91, a Washington, Pa., native now living in the Lund Care Center on the Concordia at Cabot campus in Butler County. “They were attacking the World Trade Center, and it wasn’t the Japanese. I didn’t think that way.”

Neither did Artkowsky, 95, who lived most of his life in Lower Burrell and spent 16 months in Yokohama, Japan, with the U.S. Army after the fighting ended. Artkowsky, who now lives in the Lund Care Center, said his wife woke him up on the morning of Sept. 11 and told him what was happening.

“I was stunned, but I never thought about it,” he said, referring to the connection between Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

Weiland said the fact that Pearl Habor was so far away from the mainland U.S. — and that the Sept. 11 attacks took place in major East Coast cities — made it harder for him to see the similarities.

“People didn’t seem to be as interested in Pearl Habor, but maybe that’s because I was such a young kid,” he said. “The things that were happening in New York, I was older and I paid a lot more attention. It was terrible.”

Weiland said he’s still stunned at what he saw in New York and Washington that day. “Those terrorists — you never know what the hell they’re going to do,” he said. “People in this world anymore, I don’t know. I don’t know why we can’t just live in peace.”