Two separate waves of 350 attacking Japanese torpedo planes, dive bombers and fighters swarmed over Pearl Harbor on the morning of Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, leaving in their wake a decimated U.S. Pacific fleet, an emasculated Army Air Corps and a stunned, angry and terrified populace.
The final count from what President Roosevelt would label as the “day that would live in infamy” was lopsided: four U.S. battleships sunk as well as seven other ships crippled or sunk, 180-plus aircraft destroyed and nearly 2,500 Army, Navy and Marine personnel killed, with another 1,280 wounded. The Japanese lost fewer than 40 aircraft and several midget submarines.
But the surprise nature of the attack also resulted in what Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had feared: Awakening “a sleeping giant and filling him with a terrible resolve.” Pearl Harbor became the 20th century equivalent of the Alamo, only with far greater global consequences.
Pearl Harbor pulled isolationist, militarily unprepared America into the bloody cauldron of World War II. Germany quickly declared war on the United States. Later British Prime Minister Winston Churchill would say that he knew the Allies would not lose the war after Germany invaded Russia in June of 1941 and that he knew the Allies would be victorious after America entered the war.
Warfare today is far different than the set-piece battles fought on the steppes of Russia, in the jungles of the South Pacific and Burma, and across North Africa, Italy and Western Europe. In those days, Americans knew who their enemies were.
But today’s combatants are nameless and faceless. They are terrorists who fight unconventionally. They strap on bombs and target troops, military convoys or innocent civilians. Their objective is to achieve their political aims by spreading fear.
They can be beaten. But it will take time and perseverance. The question is one of whose will is stronger, the al-Qaida fanatic or those civilized nations who saved the world from the Nazi and Japanese empires in World War II.
