Why Is It Crucial to Understand History as It Really Happened?

It is good for us to understand history – the truth about what really happened and not revisionist history. Three days ago, we commemorated Pearl Harbor Day, the 84^th anniversary of the surprise attack on America. At 7:00 A.M. on December 7, 1941, Japanese planes flew over Pearl Harbor, destroyed American ships, killed American sailors, and plunged the United States into World War II. Historian Victor Davis Hanson taught a powerful history lesson in his article published at The Daily Signal. 

Hanson reminds his readers that America was not at war when the Japanese struck. Europe had been fighting for “almost two and a half years” – September 1, 1939, through December 7, 1941. The United States watched as the Germans invaded Western Europe and the Balkans and were at “the gates of Russia.” Meanwhile, the Japanese had invaded China and controlled nearly half of what is now China. Japan also controlled South Korea and North Korea.

And remember that the European colonial powers – the Netherlands and France – had ceased to exist as independent countries. So, their colonial possessions in the Pacific – specifically the breadbasket of Asia, in the Mekong Delta of Southeast Asia, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam – were no longer under independent French control. And the Japanese had absorbed them.

But more importantly, what is now Indonesia, then called the Dutch East Indies – the Dutch had control of these islands. They were very rich in oil. The Dutch Shell oil company had substantial oil wells there. And the Japanese wanted to absorb those.

It was [in] that context that they attacked us. We didn’t attack them. We knew that war was coming. We wanted to deter them by beefing up the Philippines and moving the headquarters of the Seventh Fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, which President Franklin Roosevelt had done.

Why did they attack? They said that they did not want to attack. They were in the process of negotiating a peace settlement. They said that we had cut off their oil exports. And we had because we had no other mechanism to convince them to get out of China, it was not their territory, to get out of Korea, to get out of Southeast Asia, and to not absorb the Dutch East Indies.

They had refused on all of those accounts and said, yet, we will find a peaceful solution, as they planned the attack.

The attack happened at seven in the morning, deliberately, on a Sunday morning when people were either at church or still asleep from Saturday night partying. And they came out of the rising sun. Two waves. And they destroyed four battleships and … disabled four that sunk to the shallow bottom of Pearl Harbor.

The three carriers – the Saratoga, the Lexington, and the Enterprise – were not there. That was a gift because had they been, we would’ve had no naval air power in the Pacific.

The other thing to remember about this attack, they did not order a third strike. Had they done that, they could have wiped out the oil refinery tanks, aviation fuel, and naval fuel for a year. They did not hit the machine repair shops. And they didn’t mop up and completely destroy all of the aircraft or ships. And the battleships that they did take out were of World War I vintage.

So, in other words, these ships, had they steamed out of Pearl Harbor and met six carriers, over 300 planes on the high seas, they may have been sunk very easily on the high seas. And we would’ve lost 2,400 Americans, but perhaps 10,000.

So, it was a dramatic wake-up call to us. And we did declare war the next day on Japan. And then Germany and Italy and their allies declared war on us, as did Japan, on Dec. 11.

Hanson had a couple of other thoughts about Pear Harbor. (1) The U.S. did not provoke Japan, but Japan attacked America at a time of peace…. (2) Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto -- and sometimes Adm. Chuichi Nagumo – was said to attack Pearl Harbor “reluctantly” and was credited with saying: “I’ve awakened a sleeping dragon. And I can’t account for what he’ll do when he is active [mobilized].” The truth is different.

But Yamamoto had said to the military government in Tokyo, if you don’t let me attack Pearl Harbor, I’m gonna resign. And this is the only solution to our problem as a military one, to shock these Americans. And they’re weak and they’re decadent.

Yamamoto had been to the United States. Gen. Hideki Tojo had been to the United States. Their foreign minister had been an exchange student in Oregon. So, they thought that we … were decadent, coming out of the Depressio, and not a serious people. And they made a serious miscalculation.

[3] Another myth about Pearl Harbor is that the Japanese were somehow victimized, that they really didn’t wanna go to war. No, no, no, no, no. They were the most vicious of all the belligerents, in some sense.

If you use a simple calculation, what was the size of one of the belligerent armies? And how many people did they kill? And how many people did they lose? If you look at the Japanese Imperial Navy and Army, and given its size and given the number of belligerents, combatants had lost and civilians versus how many they killed, they were more lethal than either the Russians on our side or the Germans on the other side.

About 2.5 million Japanese were killed. They killed 16 to 20 million people in China, civilians and combatants. They killed probably another 3 million to 4 million people in Asia, whether that’s the Burma campaign or Southeast Asia or the Philippines. And then, in addition, in the Pacific, and Allied troops, Australians, British Americans, they probably killed another 300,000 to 400,000, minimum.

Japanese military was the most vicious and the most lethal force, in some sense, in World War II, in a strictly military sense. It was a vicious force, and only the bravery of the United States military stopped it. And that effort began at Pearl Harbor, when Japan, for no reason, attacked us, and we reacted accordingly and made them pay for one of the stupidest blunders in the history of the Japanese nation.