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.
