Remembering December 7

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, is one of those events that proves so consequential it is hard to describe. When confronting such a situation, it is always best to turn to Winston Churchill. In The Grand Alliance he eloquently describes his reaction on hearing about the admittedly very skillful and destructive Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the entry of America into WWII:

“No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. {. . .} So we had won after all! {. . . } Silly people, and there were many, not only in enemy countries, might discount the force of the United States. Some said they were soft, others that they would never be united. They would fool around at a distance. They would never come to grips. They would never stand blood-letting. Their democracy and system of recurrent elections would paralyse their war effort. They would be just a vague blur on the horizon to friend or foe. Now we should see the weakness of this numerous but remote, wealthy, and talkative people. But I had studied the American Civil War, fought out to the last desperate inch. American blood flowed in my veins. I thought of a remark which Edward Grey had made to me more than thirty years before – that the United States is like ‘a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.’ Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”

Indeed, the boiler was "lighted." In the most amazing performance by a nation in history, the United Staes went in just over three years from a Depression-wracked, barely armed, confused, and all but defeated nation to the most powerful one on earth. Its military, a largely sleepy peacetime force, became the masters of huge, technically complex operations on a scale never before or since seen, using weapons and tactics that had not even existed before the war began. American industry poured out a dazzling array of weaponry and equipment unmatched before or since. Above all, the United States proved to possess an understanding of modern warfare that, with the notable exceptions of Churchill and Yamamoto, observers would not have suspected it to have. We tend to forget that within five months of Pearl Harbor, a US-Australian naval force stopped Japanese expansion southward, and that the stunning American naval victory of Midway came just six months after Pearl Harbor. Within nine months, an American-led offensive was underway in the Solomon Islands, most notably on Guadalcanal. As, furthermore, Churchill notes in his passage above, the Americans took and put up with casualties, some 400,000 dead and missing.

The magnitude and the global reach of the American war effort remain awe inspiring. During my tours in Latin America, for example, I found it striking how many airfields and harbors the USA built in Central and South America and throughout the Caribbean during the war. Old timers in Guatemala told me of how quickly the FBI showed up getting the Guatemalans to round up German and Italian nationals. This was an area that was certainly a backwater compared to Europe and the Pacific, but still American industrial might and organizational skill were readily evident and effective.

Compare that performance to the current misadministration's inability to set up a website in roughly the time it took to go from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima.