Today is the 69th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. The degree of confusion that before, during, and after the attack is something that many people cannot accept. The American tendency towards conspiracy theories and witch hunts, the need to lay the blame at someone's doorstep, has never been stronger than in the continuing struggle to understand Pearl Harbor.
The simple truth is that the attack was very daring, very well conducted, and not as successful as it needed to be. We were scarcely able to believe that the Japanese were capable of carrying it out. The Japanese were unwilling to accept that we could recover that quickly. Part of this was racism on both sides, part of it was wishful thinking by both parties, and a very large part of it was, and is, the failure to understand how significantly war had changed between 1918 and 1941. It was difficult for anyone to grasp all of the changes. Some understood the transformation in tactics and materiel, some saw how logistics and strategy had changed, a few even comprehended the new information warfare of global communications. Few, if any were able to put all of that together.
One of our chief problems looking back is to try to put ourselves in the minds of commanders and politicians, from Yamamoto to FDR. We look at the rapid metamorphosis of naval warfare over the next four years and read it backward. We forget that, despite the successfully Otranto Raid by British torpedo planes on the Italian fleet the year before, no naval air attack on this scale had ever been attempted. We forget too how much attention in Washington was then directed at Europe and the Atlantic. Finally, we forget how much the human factor, and human fallibility control events, whether then or now.
I've written a blog post everyday for the past month. I did this to prove to myself that I could do it as much as to acclimatize myself to blog writing. I am going to slow down now, allow myself more time and more thought, in order, I hope, to produce better results. I expect I'll be putting up something two or three times a week.
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