Today is 7 December.
Seventy nine years ago on this date the Empire of Japan attacked the US
Navy at Pearl Harbor.
This was one of the decisive world changing military actions of the
entire war. In the space of a few hours
it complete changed American outlook on the war which had been raging for two
years already. Pre Pearl harbor
Americans were determined not to get sucked into another European war. Not
matter what atrocities the Nazi’s or the Japanese performed, we were NOT going
to jump into the war no matter what. We
had done that 25 years before. We had
beaten the Germans but the overall results were not so good. We had loaned the Allies (British and French
mostly) huge amounts of money. After the
war most everyone welshed on their war debts to us. And a bunch of peaceniks started up the
“merchants of death” business. They
claimed that the arms makers had set off WWI to improve their arms sales. And we took a horrible number of combat
deaths. The British and the French took
even more, but we didn’t care much about that.
The whole ball of wax and ill feeling was called isolationism. It got to Congress where laws to prevent us
from ever going to war again were passed.
Isolationism was so strong that even Franklin Roosevelt, probably the
strongest US
president of the 20th century could not go against it.
In a couple of
hours that Sunday isolationism disappeared.
The 3000 casualties at Pearl Harbor were
shocking. Sinking the entire Pacific
battle fleet was shocking. Being
attacked on US soil,
thousands of miles from anywhere in Asia where the
Japanese were active, without a declaration of war was shocking. Sneak attack
we called it. Americans were mad and
wanted to kick some ass.
We were well
equipped to do so. We had a population of
100 million or so in those days, twice as much as the British or the French,
nearly as much as the Russians. We
commanded a rich continent that yielded all the oil, coal, iron, wheat, beef,
copper, timber, every natural resource imaginable, as we would ever need. We had an industrial base used to producing 4
million automobiles a year. No one else
could do that in 1941. We shut down
domestic automobile production and converted the car factories over to producing
war material. Jeeps, army trucks, semi
automatic M1 rifles, tanks, B-24 bombers, strange little secret agent hand
guns, just about anything imaginable.
Although we didn’t have much of an army in 1941, we fixed that
rapidly. We were able to throw an army
into North Africa six months after Pearl
Harbor big enough and strong enough to decisively beat the
Germans, under Rommel.
We unleashed a
whirlwind against Japan. We sank their carrier fleet at Midway. We put the Marines ashore on Guadalcanal. We threw in airpower and seapower and more
infantry to hold Guadalcanal. We launched a submarine fleet that sank the
entire Japanese merchant marine by 1945.
We developed and dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. Admiral Yamamoto said “I fear we have
awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.” He had that right.
A more intelligent
Japanese government would have gone far out its way to avoid antagonizing the United
States.
We had absolutely no intention of getting into a war with them. After we embargoed oil and scrap metal to
them they could have bought all the oil they needed from the Dutch
East Indies.
