By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, May 26, 2016
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the December 7,
1941, Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that killed more than 2,400
Americans.
President Obama is visiting Hiroshima this week, the site
of the August 6, 1945, dropping of the atomic bomb that helped end World War II
in the Pacific Theater. But strangely, he has so far announced no plans to
visit Pearl Harbor on the anniversary of the attack. The president, who spent
much of his childhood in Hawaii, should do so — given that many Americans have
forgotten why the Japanese attacked the United States and why they falsely
assumed that they could defeat the world’s largest economic power.
Imperial Japan was not, as often claimed, forced into a
corner by a U.S. oil embargo, which came only after years of horrific Japanese
atrocities in China and Southeast Asia. Instead, an opportunistic and
aggressive fascist Japan gambled that the geostrategy of late 1941 had made
America uniquely vulnerable to a surprise attack.
By December 1, 1941, Nazi Germany, Japan’s Axis partner,
had reached the suburbs of Moscow. Japan believed that the German army would
soon knock the Soviet Union out of the war.
Japan had also hedged its bets by signing a nonaggression
pact with the Soviets. Japanese leaders assumed that even if communist Russia
survived, Japan could avoid a costly land war on its rear flank. The U.S., not
Japan, would likely have a two-front war.
By 1941, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium had all
been defeated and occupied by the Third Reich. Only the British remained of the
original European anti-Axis allies, and London had been under constant aerial
assault by the German Luftwaffe during the Blitz. Japan figured that Germany
and Italy might soon win the war and wished to pile on before it ended.
Japan had calculated that all of Europe’s resource-rich
Pacific and Asian colonies were now orphaned and up for grabs. By starting a
Pacific war and knocking out the U.S., Japan could get its hands on the
resources necessary to fuel its war machine.
British-held Singapore and the American bases in the
Philippines were isolated and poorly defended. And they would be completely cut
off once the U.S. Seventh Fleet and air arm were neutralized at Pearl Harbor.
Starting a war in the Pacific meant the Japanese would
have easy access to huge supplies of oil, rubber, rice, and strategic metals
for their newfound mercantile empire, the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
The U.S. also had lost military deterrence. The Japanese
had watched carefully as America did little to help its two closest allies:
France and Great Britain. The former was easily overrun by the Nazis, the
latter bombed unmercifully.
While the United States had belatedly built up its fleet
and started rearming by 1941, its military was still woefully ill-equipped to
fight a two-front global war. Japan logically figured that Germany and Italy
would tie down the United States in Europe, while Japan systematically finished
off any American warships that had escaped the Pearl Harbor wreckage.
In key categories such as fighter aircraft, torpedoes,
night gunnery, and destroyers, the Japanese were more formidable than the U.S.
military in 1941.
Finally, a number of Japan’s most accomplished officers
and diplomats had visited or studied in the U.S. in the pre-Depression boom
years — among them Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, Admirals Isoroku Yamamoto
and Tamon Yamaguchi, and General Tadamichi Kuribayashi. While they all had been
impressed with U.S. industrial power, they nevertheless had developed contempt
for American popular culture, finding it frivolous and fueled by Roaring
Twenties affluence and leisure.
Many Japanese strategists had assumed that the U.S. never
again would wish to endure a world war, and would prefer to negotiate rather
than fight to the finish. Such assumptions proved false.
After Pearl Harbor, the United States went into a
rearmament frenzy the likes of which had never been seen in history. America
produced more airplanes and ships than all World War II powers combined. The
U.S. military grew to 12 million soldiers.
American military leadership in the Pacific — led by
Admirals William Halsey Jr., Chester Nimitz, and Raymond Spruance, along with
Generals Curtis LeMay and Douglas MacArthur — proved far more skilled than
their Japanese counterparts. And the American soldier, sailor, airman, and
Marine, after a bruising learning experience in early 1942, proved every bit as
ferocious as veteran Japanese fighters.
The road to Hiroshima and the massive loss of life in the
Pacific was paved by unprovoked Japanese aggression at Pearl Harbor. Americans
and their president should remember the lessons of that surprise attack 75
years ago this year.
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