This is the 65th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese Imperial Navy. Wikipedia has a pretty good entry.
The Imperial Japanese Navy made its attack on Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii, was aimed at the Pacific Fleet of the United States Navy and its defending Army Air Corps and Marine air forces. The attack damaged or destroyed twelve U.S. warships, destroyed 188 aircraft, and killed 2,403 American servicemen and 68 civilians. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto planned the raid as the start of the Pacific Campaign of World War II, and it was commanded by Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who lost 64 servicemen. However, the Pacific Fleet’s three aircraft carriers were not in port and so were undamaged, as were oil tank farms and machine shops. Using these resources the United States was able to rebound within six months to a year. The U.S. public saw the attack as a treacherous act and rallied strongly against the Japanese Empire, resulting in its later defeat.
When you think about it, it’s pretty remarkable that it took us only 1,347 days from being sucker punched on 12/7/1941 to having defeated the combined might of the Axis powers by VJ Day – August 15, 1945; a span of 3 years, 8 months, and 8 days.
But as more than one conservative commentator has noted, the Axis powers’ threat to us paled in comparison to the Islamo-fascist threat. Or something like that.
Some people are utterly incapable of perspective. Both Pearl Harbor and 9/11 killed about the same number of people. The difference was that the Empire of Japan had a whole nation full of people and factories capable of producing and wielding armaments to kill Americans. They also had German allies with even stronger capabilities.
Bin-Laden & al-Qaeda had no such capacity. Iraq and Hussein weren’t even in the game until we made them players.
Then how did they kill the around the same number of Americans during their sneak attack?
I agree, they are not the same types of threats, and the wars that came of the attacks can’t be compared.
I think that’s where T got his comment, though. We have fought, and won, the type of war that came from Japan and Germany. If two modern countries tried the same type of war, then I would say that kind of a war would be less of a threat to our country than the one we are facing now.
To be clear, I don’t mean in terms of number of lives, but in terms of the USA surviving. We would survive WWIII (again, assuming it was a conventional war), but it would be at a cost of many thousands of lives. The war would have a start and end. I can’t say that we’ll come out as a whole country after this war we’re in now, though.
By commandeering 3 airplanes with a few box cutters.
Their power to harm the U.S. is trivial compared to the power possessed by the combined might of Imperial Japan and the Third Reich. Their ability to harm us poses approximately the same risk as we voluntarily assume every day when we drive a car.
Most of al Qaeda’s ability to harm us comes from the energy we supply them. They were able to use our airplanes against us. But even that was a papercut compared to the self-inflicted wounds we have created through our response to their actions. We have sent thousands of our soldiers off to their deaths and have spent the better part of a trillion dollars of money we borrowed from China and which our children will have to pay back with interest. And we’ve gotten squat in return.
You’re probably right though. The two “wars” probably can’t be compared. Our response to WWII was like using a shotgun to repel an intruder into our house who has just cut us with a knife. Our response to 9/11 was to use a shotgun to repel a mosquito who has just taken a bite out of us. The first is a reasonable response. The second is batshit insane. And, to take the analogy further, you can probably look forward to a day when you’ve eliminated the intruder. You’re never going to eradicate mosquitos.
My point is that it doesn’t matter if they killed us with Mitsubishi Zeros or our own planes, they killed us. Their ability to harm us was proven in both cases, regardless how they did it.
My point about the wars is that the old war was fought by killing us. Kill enough of us and our people would be ruled directly by a forign government. While the stated goal of this new war is to just kill all of us, the threat is not that we’ll all die. The threat is that our way of life will be crippled.
Put another way…in WWII, our country was the goal, but they had (and did) kill a lot of us to get that goal. In this war, killing our people is the goal. The risk of them doing that is low, but the risk of our country being ruined is higher than before.
“The stated goal of this new war is to just kill all of us”…says who? The blatently imperialistic, enthusiastically war-mongering thugs known as neoconservatives? The quasi-fascist demagogues at the Fox Right-Wing Propaganda Channel? I would certainly like to see a citation as to when and where Osama, or any of the many, many #2 men in Al-Qaeda we’ve killed, have in fact actually uttered those words. As for “the threat…that our way of life will be crippled”, Al-Qaeda cannot do that–only cowardly Americans succumbing to right-wing fear-mongering can do that!
It wasn’t just that the American carriers weren’t in port, the absence of any intelligence on their whereabouts, and the inference based on radio traffic on the part of Nagumo’s chief of staff, Rear Adm. Kusaka, that the USAAF had fifty operational heavy bombers on the islands, seem to have completely dominated Nagumo’s thinking. Knowing the fuel tank farm and machine shops were untouched, he turned back to pull his carriers out of range of land based aircraft (which posed both a direct threat to his ships and risked exposure of his location). I have long found it ironic that the Japanese military, having staked everything on the reckless gamble of war with the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, shrank from the prospect further strikes past the first two at Pearl Harbor.
The mind set of Japanese naval authorities seemed obsessed with the notion of the “decisive battle” in keeping with the great victory of the IJN over the Russian fleet at Tsushima rather than the more typical struggle reflected by the events of WWI and the experiences of the Grand Fleet and the High Seas Fleet in the North Sea. While they realized that the carrier, not the battleship, would be the more important factor in the war and chose not to risk their carriers on prosaic details.
Further strikes at Pearl would have course just prolonged the war, perhaps for another year, and the result, I am confident, the Japanese knew was defeat. Perhaps Nagumo’s decision to withdraw can be regarded as, in a sense, highly moral. Unless the Japanese could bring about circumstances where they had a chance for a decisive victory, they knew they would lose. Decisive victory meant sinking our carriers. Actions that would simply gain delay at the risk of the weapons platforms needed for the decisive battle would only be undertaken under the best of circumstances. Prolonging a war knowing defeat is inevitable simply results in people being killed.
Paul,
You wrote:
…a sobering observation indeed, given its contemporary applicability.
We will never know what would have happened had the carriers been at Pearl, but the fact is that Nagumo wasn’t going to get them by staying where he was. What you had among the Japanese then is awfully familiar to us now–a large contingent with only the vaguest notion of what America was, which saw the Pacific as a metaphysical battle of good vs. evil; a smaller contingent in the early stages of what came to be called “Victory disease,” who imagined the Americans were going to be forced to compromise and permit Japan to dominate half the Pacific; and the realists, who watched the commision of “national hara-kari”, unable to stop the thing.
Like anything else, the reality is a lot more complicated and less clear-cut than the lessons we try to make of it, but the idea that “they were out to conquer us” is a good deal overblown, just as insisting the same thing about, at best, a few thousand murderous radicals sixty years later is just making the thing into a convenient morality tale, and it is that very act of inflating their significance which does their work for them and leads to useless resource and people-wasting gestures.