WHY did they HATE America??
It was 70 years ago this morning that, as President Roosevelt put it the following day, “The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”
Then, four days later, Adolf Hitler declared war on America.
Thus was a fundamentally isolationist nation, content until then to pretend that two wide oceans could protect it from a world at war, dragged roughly onto the international stage — where it remains, fitfully, to this day.
Its Pearl Harbor adventure didn’t end well for Japan; Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, the tactical architect of the attack, had said it would serve only to awaken “a sleeping giant” — and, of course, it did.
Similarly, Hitler’s miscalculation sealed his own nation’s fate. America had no appetite for war with Germany in late 1941 — leaving Roosevelt, who never doubted its necessity, worried whether he’d be able to persuade Congress to agree.
Four years later, most of the world was in smoking ruins — most notably, Germany and Japan — and at least 60 million people were dead.
Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union had, arguably, suffered most grievously from the conflict — but appeared not to have had enough.
Presently what Winston Churchill termed “an iron curtain” would bifurcate Europe as Moscow designed and deployed yet another existential threat to the Western democracies.
This time, America understood and embraced its responsibilities. Despite occasional foot-dragging, it lived up to them — providing good example and necessary stability to the world in the process.
Whether the nation retains the will to look after its interests properly is an open question. There is cause for concern.
But on Dec. 7, 1941 — “a date which will live in infamy” — all doubts were dispelled.
History knocked.
America answered. |
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