Learning the Lessons of Pearl Harbor Today

How many attacks by Islamist/Muslims do we sustain before we say enough?

This should have been number 1 article on the Must Read List. Very important article to read to learn about the threat that Russia faces to the West.

The threat expands beyond Russia. Recall that a new axis of evil consisting of Russia, China/NK, and Iran is forming. In Weichert's article, it isn't clear what longstanding disputes between Russia and America require resolution. Although it is obvious that Putie wants to re-annex eastern Europe thus expanding Russia's border. China desires to dominate the world economically and for America to become its serfs. Iran desires for sharia law to govern America. NK and Kimmie just want to shoot missiles whenever they feel like it. President Trump isn't interested in any of this. So, Weichert, how is he supposed to negotiate in good faith with tyrants?

Russia...really? With a long-run collapsing economy and imploding population, any such attack would be national suicide. Oligarchs would not be in a hurry to impede their profiteering by attacking customers. As is evident, Russia "re-jiggering" its boundaries is no concern to anyone except those being jiggered. It's all bits of the former Romanov/Soviet empire anyways. Russia is hardly the center of the "evil empire" these days. Meanwhile, we continue to occupy Japan and South Korea. We have become Hessians.

"..had the United States negotiated in good faith, the Pacific war might have been avoided entirely". That is extremely naïve even with 20/20 hind sight. The interests involved were fundamental and fundamentally clashing. It would have been like giving in to Schiff/Pelosi's immediate demands and then hoping everything would be all right. The Japanese would simply have moved the goal posts.

The author gets a number of facts wrong, which show a shallow reading of the history of the WW2 war in the Pacific. First, we absolutely had not "cracked the encrypted Japanese communications network", even though this non-fact is widely written in superficial, simplistic historical treatments. USN cryptologists were able to decrypt some fragments of a few messages, maybe reading 20% of some messages, piecing bits of info gleaned here and there into shadowy hints of what the Japanese were doing. It is so often repeated that we were reading all the Japanese encode messages, yet somehow got caught flat footed. It is just not factual. Next he states "had the United States simply negotiated in good faith with Japan, the Pacific War may have been avoided entirely." This is pure revisionist history, wishful thinking to the point of ridiculousness. The Japanese had decided that they should "rightfully" control all of the western Pacific countries, and all their critical resources. Japan has essentially no energy, rubber or metals resources, all must be imported. And their extremely racist, tremendously self-confident military had been easily defeating all their adversaries that they came up against in the 1930s, (including the Russian Navy a few decades earlier) convincing Japanese military of their invincibility. After the war, the Japanese called their bottomless overconfidence 'victory disease'. The only way negotiations were going to defuse events would be for the US and Britain to agree to let Japan run rampant over the Philippines, the critical oil supplies in Borneo, all the SE Asian countries and to continue their literal and figurative rape of China. Too many easily forget or dismiss the extreme, murderous violence of Japanese troops everywhere they went, their gratuitous killing of helpless civilians by the hundreds of thousands, literally for sport and entertainment. The Japanese were so convinced of their extreme racial and cultural superiority that nothing was going to prevent them from viciously taking what they wanted and needed to feed their planned empire. The only negotiations that would have "worked" would have been a broad, complete capitulation to all their bloodthirsty and territory-thirsty, resource thirsty expansion of their empire. All the author's misreading of history aside, his point that we have let our critical communications satellites become vulnerable is accurate. We definitely should be working to make our satellites either able to maneuver and/or defend themselves, or make them very quickly replaceable in a wartime scenario. I tend to think that the author somewhat overestimates our dependence on our sat net, but it is factual that we depend on our satellites a great deal, and that this may tempt our adversaries to strike at them. This is an interesting read, but the first part is marred by sloppy research in an effort to link it to our historic day. Let's hope his sloppy research is only in that area. I support us being more proactive on making our resources in space less attractive targets, and more easily replaced or reinforced.

As usual, some of my fellow L-Dotters know their stuff. Having lived and worked in Tokyo for 6+ years I can report that nearly once/week for 6 YEARS some Japanese stranger would come up to me and bow lowly and THANK me for what the Americans did to stop the war in it's tracks. They said the Japanese would still be fighting today if Americans had not stepped in, no matter how drastic our actions were---they were necessary. The deep bows to a FEMALE gaijin stranger said it all.

Had we been training Japanese pilots at our bases before the war, or did we just start with Saudis? 747s maybe.

Very interesting comment, #7. I have extensively read on the war in the Pacific, and studied the history closely, and my father was a pilot in a newly formed fighter squadron, a week from getting on the carrier to enter the war when the atom bombs ended it. It is always interesting to learn more about Japan and the Japanese in my lifelong efforts to learn about this huge historic event which could have prevented my very existence had things gone a bit differently.

Brandon J. Weichert needs a refresher course on United States History!!

They missed the carriers. The missed the fuel storage tanks. They missed the shipyard repair facilities. Lousy planning, lousy execution, or both? Terrible loss of life, but by then battleships were largely obsolete, as the war went on to prove.

#11, agree with all except the battleships being obsolete. - early in the war we couldn't have our remaining carriers everywhere. Battleships and cruisers held the line in the seas around the Solomons where the action was mainly at night. So having carrier borne aviation wouldn't have mattered anyway. Read the accounts of the surface battles at the time and it was kill or be killed with the US Navy showing pure guts in the face of overwhelming odds against a Japanese surface fleet whose sailors were experts at night gunnery. - As it turned out, battleships were the ships which could keep up with the carriers especially in heavy seas. The battleships provided much needed support, especially with their many anti-aircraft batteries. - finally, battleships were second to none in providing naval gunfire support to amphibious operations.

A great book on the battleships in the Solomon Islands is "The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors". To the the point at hand, we didn't learn from 9/11. We didn't learn about allowing our military to be armed on bases after Fort Hood or the shootings at the Naval Yard in DC. Why would anyone expect that we will learn from this incident?

Good points, #12. I was thinking along the lines of the fate of the Musashi, Yamato, et.al. Very vulnerable to air attack. And the Brits disabled and doomed the Bismarck with biplanes.

#13, there were no American battleships (BBs) at the Battle Off Samar which is recounted in the very good Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors. The point of the name is that only "tin cans"; destroyers (DDs) and destroyer escorts (DEs); were available to defend the slow, vulnerable escort carriers from a massed battleship, cruiser and destroyer gunfire surface warfare attack by Kurita's so-called 'Center Force". Perhaps you are using the term "battleship" loosely to mean all surface warfare ships, including the destroyers and destroyer escorts, but the term refers to a specific class of warships, referred to technically as BBs. The American battleships (BBs) were arrayed to the south of Leyte in the Surigao Strait waiting for the Japanese Southern Force to arrive, where the rebuilt old BBs sunk at Pearl Harbor finally got their revenge, absolutely slaughtering Nishimura's ships in literally the last great surface naval gun battle that the world has seen and is likely to ever see.

Re: #11's comments, Admiral Nagumo got cold feet and didn't sent in another wave to attack the fuel supplies and the drydock facilities. Bad planning, and then bad leadership. They had so thoroughly destroyed our air power, almost all on the ground, that they could have remained and destroyed these things at their leisure. But, they didn't really know that, and were very nervous not knowing where our carriers were. About six months later, not knowing where our carriers were cost them four of their best carriers, so it seems to me that Nagumo wasn't far off. It is easy to forget how effectively whole task forces could "disappear" in the wide Pacific in those days of comparatively short range search aircraft and no satellites.

"And, had the United States simply negotiated in good faith with Japan, the Pacific War may have been avoided entirely." Does this guy believe that people who were capable of the systemic cruelty inflicted by the Japanese in their crazy expansion could be negotiated with? Maybe the Chinese could have prevented the "rape of the Nanking," by saying, "Lets talk about this." What a jerk.

The answer is when it comes to defense “keep a weathers eye out matey”.

Lesson 1. When the Japanese War College has as its graduation exercise the bombing of Pearl Harbor for several years, what did they expect? Peace in our time? Peace comes when you are the strongest kid on the block. Nobody messed with Rome and won for several hundred years. Appeasement never works.