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How many even remember today? If it happened today we would have scores of fools making excuses and wondering "What did WE do to make them want to attack us?" And then the same people call the president a warmonger for striking back. This country couldn't survive WWII now let alone win it...
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Ah, WWII, a subject as near and dear to me as Napoleon is to GL....
I thought of that when I changed the calendar this morning as well. I was at UC during the 50th anniversary, and what I remember most about that commemoration was...well...the lack of commemoration. A student wrote a letter to the "News Record" (UC's paper) questioning why, every year, there was a write-up in that paper regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but even on the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, not much at all.
The following week, one of my fellow political science majors wrote a response, basically arguing that the dropping of the atomic bombs was one of the most significant events in history (he's right there) as well as one of its greatest war crimes (LanD and I will be debating this at Colerain High School one of these days), while December 7 more or less didn't signify that much.
And if he actually had known what he was talking about (he didn't), there is actually a grain of truth to that statement. The Soviets had been at war since June 1941 (and actually fought the Finns in 1940, and the Japanese in 1939). The British and the French had been at war since 1939. The Germans, depending on what date you want to use, had been invading other countries going back to 1936. The Japanese went into Manchuria in 1931. So while December 7 was a huge date in American history, it wasn't so big for the rest of the world, most of which was already at war.
Except.......
It marked the official beginning of the end of the Japanese empire (they lost that war the moment the first bomb fell on Honolulu). And because Germany subsequently declared war on us as a result, it pretty much sealed their doom as well.
I agree with your sentiments, GL. I don't really think you can do the "what if" with Japan vs. the U.S. But where I think it gets interesting is if the Japanese had attacked Eastern Russia in 1941, right after (or close to) the German invasion on the west. Despite their strategic blunders, the Germans came awful close to breaking the Soviets. I think their guns made it to about 30 miles from Moscow, and while I don't think the Soviets would ever have surrendered entirely, the Germans could have occupied enough of their land to render them ineffective as to the Allies. Especially if the Soviets would have had to divert resources to fighting a Japanese invasion from the East.
The significance of the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 also can't be overstated. I don't believe the Germans would have been able to conquer Britain, but again, I'm not sure they necessarily had to. All they had to do is cripple them enough to the point where they become ineffective. Their failure in 1940 allowed the Brits to continue building the same airplanes and tanks that started to turn the tide in 1942-43.
I suppose in hindsight, our development of the A-bomb may have made all of it moot, anyway. Regardless of what FDR told Churchill, it's clear that the U.S. believed the Germans were capable of defeating Britain. This is demonstrated by our development of the long-range bombers (first the B-29, and later the B-36) that could take off from North America, bomb Germany, and return without having to rely on the Brits in any way.
And all participants made huge blunders that, in hindsight, had enormous consequences. A lot of Russians did not care for Stalin and his policies. There were those in the German command who argued that the Germans should spin their "invasion" of the Soviet Union as a "liberation" of its people from tyranny. Similarly, there was a Japanese plan on the table to attack India but spin it as "freeing" them from British colonialism. As it turned out, the Germans proceeded to lay-waste to Russia (ensuring that all those fractured Soviet states became strongly united against a common enemy), and the Japanese invasion of India never really got off the ground.
As if you couldn't tell already, I am an emormous WWII-phile, I just think it is the most amazing thing to read about. In think the convergence of technology alone is astonishing. It was the last war to use bi-planes in combat, it was the first war to use jets. It was the last war to use horses, it was the first (and hopefully last) to see atomic weapons. There were 6 major carrier vs. carrier battles in the Pacific, I don't see how there will ever again be a carrier vs. carrier battle (and I shudder to think what would happen if there was).
Compare this:
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">With this:If it happened today we would have scores of fools making excuses and wondering "What did WE do to make them want to attack us?" And then the same people call the president a warmonger for striking back. This country couldn't survive WWII now let alone win it...
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Interesting...There's no reason why we should ask them to apologize for doing something that we more or less wanted them to do, i.e. attack us.
In speculating "what if" the U.S. never entered the war, I sometimes go back much further. What if we had not committed genocide against Native Americans and secured the territory between two oceans? And what if we had decided to let the South secede? We would not have been able to open another front in Europe = The 1000 Year Reich.
And if I may extrapolate on an issue that has always bothered me...
A lot of American organizations have expressed disappointment (sometimes anger) that Japan has never "apologized" for Pearl Harbor.
I respectfully dissent. There's no reason why we should ask them to apologize for doing something that we more or less wanted them to do, i.e. attack us. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that we wanted them to attack and kill over 2,000 of our military personnel in Hawaii. But we did want them to attack, and the Philipines was (in our estimation) the most logical choice.
Some people had argued, going back to the turn of the century, that the U.S. and Japan would fight a naval war. Gen. Billy Mitchell, in 1924, had warned of a carrier attack on Pearl Harbor someday (in an editorial opinion, the New York Times basically laughed him out of the building for such a silly suggestion).
My grandfather didn't even know what Pearl Harbor was when he learned of the attack. I suspect that was true for the vast majority of Americans who heard the breaking news. You go back and read the newspaper accounts, and even the history books, and that's pretty much the company line- that we were minding our own business, when for no reason at all we got sucker-punched.
History has more than demonstrated it was just a little more complicated than that.
We had entered into a trade embargo that required the Japanese to do one of two things- a) pull out of Indochina, or b) go to war with us. We certainly wanted option (b). I've always wondered what we would have done if they would have agreed to our demands.
Believe it or not, there were those in the Japanese high command who knew that attacking the U.S. would be suicide for their empire. Unfortunately for them, the ones who had the final say felt otherwise. Yamamoto himself had argued for years against a war with the U.S. But, once it became clear to him that war was inevitable, he actually did what a good military leader would do- he designed a plan which, if executed properly, would give his Navy the best chance to win (and by "best chance", I mean "slim" as opposed to "none")
You make some very good points Lew, esp about the background leading up to the attack. Who can guess what the results of WWII had been had Japan not given FDR the cause celebre he needed to draw us into combat? England would have fallen, Hitler would have controlled all of Europe and cultivated US neutrality to fight Russia, Japan's Empire would have grown, leaving the US basically isolated between the Germans and Japan. At least that's one simplistic scenario. One needs to factor into Hitler's possible conquests in this scenario the resistance and guerilla tactics that would have been employed against him, and the growing dissent in the German high command. While not a student of WWII per se, I have often wondered "what if..." the US had not ever entered into the conflict at all.
Lan, there are some books about what would be different if the the South had won by Newt Gingrich (Lew baby, that's your cue to return one!) that you might find interesting.
Bob recently finsihed "December 8th" (also by Newt); he said it's good, and should be a must read for folks like Lan.
That aside, 12/7/41 is what caused my father to finish high school early and sign up. Just like his older brothers. And friends. And cousins.
Semper Fi to all of our heros.
Actually I have been interested in reading Gingrich's book about "what if" Hitler had won, forget what it's called...
Gae-
I gave that Gingrich book to LanD, and he told me he'd see to it personally that you guys got it back....
WILL YOU RELAX? It's right on my bookshelf, I have read it, I will get it back to you. Geesh...
LanD, while I have not been a proponent of the current fighting in Iraq, I do agree with GL that it would have been difficult (if not impossible) for the Allies to prevail had they had to deal with this current generation of media types.
And don't get me wrong, I don't believe in government control of the media during a time of war or anything like that. Truth be told, there are probably a lot of things that the WWII media did NOT report that they should have.
I guess I'm still jaded (20 years later) by Mike Wallace's comments on the PBS "Ethics in America" series, when he said that if he were embedded with enemy troops, and knew of an ambush on unsuspecting U.S. troops, he wouldn't do a thing about it....yes that's only one person's opinion, but I wonder how many of them share his feelings, and that was 20 years ago, God knows what they would say today...I don't know, it just really disturbed me.
As for the "what if" discussion, it's true that the farther back you go, the harder it is to guess how things would be different because so many variable would be altered (for example, the naval battle at Salamis in 480 B.C.- go back in time and change that result ro a Persian victory over the Greeks, it seems safe to say that "western" civilization would have taken a decidedly different course but we can't be specific)
But when you're talking about more recent events, the field is comparatively more narrow and you can speculate with a comparatively higer degree of authority.
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