An alternative view of Pearl Harbor

I wonder why Americans get so worked up about the “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor back in 1941… it is common knowledge that we knew an attack was imminent.  We just didn’t expect the Japanese to have such a long reach – it wasn’t considered likely that they would be able to get that far from their home islands for an attack.  I’d have to look it up, but I'm thinking that we thought that the first assaults would come in the Philippines, or somewhere else in the Far East.  But you cannot say that we didn’t know they were coming.  We had known war was imminent for months. Our forces in every part of the Pacific were supposed to be on alert for that very eventuality.

Beyond that, the USA has engaged in exactly the same kind of surprise attacks both before and after that day – so it’s not OK for someone else to do it to us, but it’s OK for us to do it to them?  In what universe is that moral behavior?

The US cavalry did a sneak attack on Black Kettle’s then-peaceful people on the Washita River in 1868. We launched a surprise attack on Panama in 1989.  The attacks on Iraq in both conflicts in that theater were both launched suddenly.   I’m sure there were others that I am not thinking of at present. In each of these instances, this nation was (and remains) convinced that we had cause for the attacks – that's how we rationalize the action -- and in each case the attacks were not unexpected by the opponent (in a general sense).  But the fact remains that these can all be characterized as surprise attacks. Japan, in 1941, felt they had good cause for the initiation of that war - they were suffering from the effects of industrial and economic strangulation by the USA and its allies.

I can name several other reasons to hate what the Japanese people did during that war; they were cruel, cold and criminal in many ways in the conduct of their conquests - the rape of Nanjing, for example, which wasn't at all limited to Nanjing. All Japanese-held territories in China suffered the same kinds of horrors. The consistent and systematic cruelty, terror and torture of both military personnel and civilians alike rivals and exceeds anything Al Qaeda criminals have accomplished or dreamed of; the horror stories are many.  The Japanese routinely executed prisoners-of-war out of convenience and cruelty - the American POW's on Wake Island early in the war are just one example, all executed after finishing reconstruction work fixing damaged facilities and the airstrip.

They have steadfastly refused in the years since 1945 to even acknowledge that what they did in those years was wrong (one example in particular concerns their refusal to acknowledge or redress the Korean and Chinese “comfort” women whose lives were so casually destroyed).  Knowing all of that history, I still have a certain animosity toward Japan today – especially when I see evidence that Japanese militaristic nationalism is again growing and causing problems.  If those small groups that are becoming more militant continue to grow, we could find ourselves again facing Japanese-caused troubles in that part of the world – and beyond.

Today, I read an article written about the attack on Pearl Harbor that made the claim it was a critical loss for us that day.  This was written by a person who (evidently)  doesn't understand the “real” history and it reaches for that emotional “tug” that our shared recollection of that day’s events evokes in us; it is what I call "ceremonial rhetoric" (my own term, not the normal academic definition in the text books - I'm not sure I use it the same way).  In any event, the claim is grossly exaggerated and I assert it to be over-dramatically irrational, from any critical historical perspective.

You could very accurately argue that far from being a Japanese victory, the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor was the beginning of the end for them – they were doomed almost from that very first day – and some of their top commanders knew that to be true (Admiral Yamamoto, for one).  The "sudden" attack awoke the American people to a “righteous” anger we haven’t matched since – and sent us against them with a resolve we could not sustain today if we tried.  

It was a tragedy that resulted in the loss of roughly 2,500 people at Pearl Harbor that day; but it launched us into a war that was inevitable anyway by that point in time; while we did lose 2,500 people on December 7th, over the next four years we lost about 475,000 more. Except for the effects on those killed and their families, our losses at Pearl Harbor were relatively insignificant when you consider the death and destruction we visited on the Axis powers over the next four years and the cost in lives and materiel not only here, but for the other nations involved. 

And the ships we lost that day?  Most of them were obsolescent and would have been largely of little value to the war effort beyond the first few months anyway.  Most of the battleships sunk or damaged, if not all of them, were over twenty years old that day and they were all critically vulnerable to air attacks, whether at sea or in port. The Imperial Navy might well have sunk most of them very quickly in other battles. At Guadalcanal, for example, where they certainly could have played a huge role for artillery support of the Marines onshore, many of them would have been eliminated by Japanese "Long Lance" torpedoes -- just as many of our cruisers were.

But the day of the “ship of the line” was over -- about twenty years over. Gen. Billy Mitchell showed us that in 1921. The irony is that while Mitchell's ideas (use of airpower through strategic and tactical bombing) met with fierce resistance in his own homeland, the Japanese fully embraced them. It is not an insignificant fact that the Japanese government sent observers when Mitchell's crude bombers sank those surplus capital ships off the east coast.  No, it was our carriers that had the real value in 1941 -- and unbeknownst to the enemy they were all at sea on the morning of December 7th and out of reach.  That was the stroke of luck that saved us in 1941.

The Pacific War was largely an air war fought by the carrier forces of both nations (that's not to diminish the credit due to the marines and troops who fought the brutal and horrific island-hopping ground campaigns). But my point is the battleship's only remaining effective role was heavy gun support of those troops landing on enemy beaches; they were unmatched by any other platform in that particular role, but that was their only real function by that time.  

The more significant "critical event" and the universally acknowledged actual turning point of the Pacific war, was the massive defeat of the Japanese Navy and its best, most powerful carriers at Midway only six months later – at the pinnacle of their project-able offensive power.  They never recovered from that defeat, and we slowly, steadily buried them in the succeeding months.

I conclude that the significance of Pearl Harbor was that it cemented the resolve of the American people to crush the Japanese and their allies. In that sense, they did this nation a favor on December 7th, if you believe as I do that our involvement in that war was inevitable by that point anyway.  And that is what all of the “day which will live in infamy” ceremonial rhetoric was about. It was plain and simple, good, effective rabble-rousing. It was, and remains, extremely effective propaganda, and not much else.

Today was the seventy-first anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States' official entry into World War II.  We remember all the Americans who died that day and all those of our nation and the allies who fought with us in the world war that followed, who saw it all the way to the end.  They saved the free world.