Cataclysmic occurrences mark us forever. The assassination of John F. Kennedy for instance. And for considerably older folks, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese December 7, 1941.
Overall, few Americans believed that such a thing could occur. Though Hawaii had become a “territory” of the United States in 1898, a majority of U.S. citizens on that quiet, sunny morning didn’t know exactly where it was.
A small child, I was playing in a western Nebraska back yard when my step-father opened the back screen door to call me into the house. The tone of his voice warned me that something was wrong. “This is bad, but it’s history. Awful history that’ll change world.” Of course I didn’t know where Hawaii was. I guessed it was one of those far-distant “travelogue” Pacific Ocean countries, a place where “natives” wore sarongs.
My small town was a Great Plains relay point for the National Broadcasting Company, a tiny station called KFWB that broke news of the attack at 1:29:50 p.m. and throughout the day repeated the slim amount of information coming out of Hawaii to NBC radio headquarters in New York.
That “day in infamy” did change everything. One of the changes the Japanese announced that day was that naval warfare would, surprisingly, now be carried out by aircraft carriers. Newsreels would increasingly be filled with terrifically dramatic and horrifying images of this new sea-going warfare.
Japanese naval forces taking part in the attack included four heavy aircraft carriers, two heavy cruisers, 35 submarines, two light cruisers, nine oilers, two battleships and 11 destroyers.The U.S. Pacific Fleet’s “principal combat vessels” at Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941, consisted of eight battleships, two heavy cruisers, six light cruisers, 30 destroyers, four submarines, plus scores of “auxiliary” vessels. Many of these were not only obsolete, but ancient: all the battleships at Pearl Harbor were of World War I vintage or older. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, former secretary of the Navy, wanted to build newer ships, but he couldn’t disguise their production from an isolationist congress. Republican legislators and their supporters had been talking of trying to impeach him for his “radical” social programs aimed at helping the most needy victims of the Great Depression, and his later “uncontrolled” (and often disguised) aid to the British people. Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Joseph Kennedy, and a packed crowd of Republicans, argued that Adolf Hitler’s fascism was “the wave of the future,” as the Wall Street Journal termed it. To many they seemed anti-American, ready to replace U.S. democracy for fascism. They were called “traitors.” The military was not immune to isolationist palsy. Just before Pearl Harbor, Air Corps chief of staff General Hap Arnold was “implicated” in leaking one of the administration’s most closely held military secrets: A contingency plan for all-out war against Hitler.
Those chickens, also caressed by numerous other high-ranking officers in the Army and Navy, came home to roost, landing heavily early on December 7, 1941.
Roosevelt had got it right when he warned that war was coming. Yet despite the Pearl Harbor attack, rabidly blind criticism continued into the first half of 1942, fired by those who still believed Hitler was merely a hard-headed “realist” with whom equally hard-headed capitalists could “deal” with. This inane insanity helped fuel a growing, if suicidal, movement to impeach FDR.
The attitude of the pre-December 7, 1941 U.S. military so nourished the country’s vulnerability and complacency that several puzzling warnings that Japan was tempted to launch an attack against the United States were ignored.
Something similar occurred in the war of 1812, which was prosecuted by one of America’s founders, President James Madison (1809-1817). He faced “almost treasonous opposition” from investors, merchants and public officials in New England. Yet he refused to limit civil liberties or declare martial law, as he was urged to do by supporters. The war appeared to many Americans merely one of choice. But it actually had to do with Britain’s wish to avenge its defeat in the War of Independence by trying to make its former colony a “client state.” That ran into the U.S. desire to establish its growing “ownership” of what was already being seen by some as an emergent “American continent.” But the war’s beginnings were nourished on the high seas. Britain was in the midst of its 1803-1814 war with Napoleonic France. The British Royal Navy, with over 600 warships, ruled the world’s waters at this time. That called for a lot of seamen. By the 18th century, Britain came to regard impressment as a maritime right and extended the practice to boarding neutral merchant ships in local waters and at sea. Following the French Revolution, France’s ambitions to enlarge its empire had spawned a pressing need for seamen. Between 1793 and 1812, Parliament increased the size of the Royal Navy from 135 to some 600 ships and expanded seamen from 36,000 to 114,000. But the Royal Navy had a long-established notorious reputation for long voyages, cruel discipline, and poor compensation. And sailors’ wages tended to be withheld for at least six months to discourage desertions.
A seaman’s life in any nation’s fleet was harsh. But British naval treatment of its sailors paled beside the more humane conditions in the navy of a nation tempered by generations of local self rule and individual freedoms. Freedoms emphatically reflected in the Declaration of Independence. The recent enlightening experience of the American Revolution, and the resulting Constitution and Bill of Rights affected this view. While some ship masters practiced retaliatory impressment involving British sailors, the U.S. disavowed impressment as an international right. Thus the whole nature and purpose of press gangs represented an affront to human rights and national sovereignty; the act of forcing individuals to serve a foreign power against their will was termed a lawless “arbitrary deprivation.”
Thus, desertion was a constant problem for the British Royal Navy. The British Admiralty guessed that ten to 15 percent of its 145,000 seamen deserted to join the American merchant and fighting navy, both of which treated seamen significantly less harshly and paid better. This prompted England to stop U.S. merchant ships ostensibly in search of gone-astray British seamen. But U.S. and British seamen were hard to tell apart, and British captains not particular regarding whether they impressed an Englishman or an American. The U.S. responded with harsh words, and sailors began to get American patriotic symbols tattooed on their arms and hands to prevent impressment.
In contrast to Pearl Harbor, the 1812 U.S. sea war began well, then went into a period of stuttering from repeated defeats to moments of victory. Dramatically, the British took Washington and set fire to the White House. The American frigate Constitution challenged a British frigate to a sea duel. A British cannonball bounced off the well-crafted wooden ship. The Constitution, which won, gained the sobriquet “Old Ironsides,” and shocked the British, breaking the “sacred spell of British naval superiority.” Andrew Jackson routed British invaders in New Orleans, losing a “mere” 71 American casualties to Britain’s 2,036. Britain went into peace talks in Ghent, with the London press calling for Madison’s execution. The British asked for annexation of northern Maine, demilitarization of the Great Lakes and an Indian agreement taking away 15 percent of America’s land. In the greatest U.S. victory, they got nothing. The war gave American’s a “new” sense of self, and changed the way the world would conduct war on the high seas.