On December 7, 1941, Japan hit us at Pearl Harbor. Our weapons were crap, we were unprepared, and we could barely fight back against the Japanese. It took half a year to win a decisive victory against Japan and in the meantime we focused our still limited power on Germany--which had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor despite nebulous ties. Besides, didn't President Roosevelt put our fleet in Hawaii to let Japan provide an excuse to go to war against Germany? That's what the conspiracy theorists charged. FDR was in the pocket of the Brits who wanted us to fight for them (Israel didn't exist yet so that particular charge wasn't available yet.)
Victor Hanson describes this incompetence in waging war, conspiracies hatched in the White House to drag us into war, taking our eye off the ball against our real enemies, and more:
Is our generation less competent?
Not really. The United States routed the Taliban from Afghanistan by early December 2001. America's first clear-cut victory against the Japanese, at Midway, came six months after Pearl Harbor.
Do we lack the unity of the past?
Perhaps. But we should at least remember that after Pearl Harbor, a national furor immediately arose over the intelligence failure that had allowed an enormous Japanese fleet to approach the Hawaiian Islands undetected. Extremists went further - clamoring that the Roosevelt administration had deliberately lowered our guard as part of a conspiracy to pave the way for America's entrance into the war.
Are we in over our heads fighting in both Afghanistan and Iraq?
Hardly. Within days after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. found itself in a three-front war against Germany, Italy and Japan - an Axis that had won a series of recent battles against the British, Chinese and Russians.
But remember, victory in that war only seems inevitable since we did in fact win it. Had we lost, we'd have plenty of errors to point to and plenty of people to blame for getting us into an unwinnable war. Our Greatest Generation won not because they could not lose, but because they fought until victory.
We don't even need to exert ourselves as much as our society did in World War II. But we must exert ourselves long enough and strenuously enough to actually win. We are writing our history right now!
And when we do win, it will all seem so inevitable. That's what the history will show, because if it happened it had to happen. Right?
When we remember Pearl Harbor, we should remember the dark days following the Day of Infamy when victory was yet to be written and 400,000 Americans had yet to die to achieve that "inevitable" victory.
