Stupid Anniversary

Something you can count on, with absolute confidence, is human stupidity. We all share it. I’m no more immune than anyone else, but fortunately I’ve never held a position of power. Sadly, those who wield power are as much victims of the universal stupidity as the rest of us.

The seventh of December is an apt anniversary to remember an act of rank stupidity by a powerful and sophisticated nation which, unfortunately for its people, had fallen under the control of a government it didn’t deserve. 

Roosevelt addressing the joint session of Congress
the day after Pearl Harbor

Eighty years ago, Japan launched a surprise attack on the US Pacific fleet’s port at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. On the eighth of December, President Franklyn Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress. His words have rung down the decades since:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

In the original draft of his speech, he’d planned to say ‘live in history’. Overnight he replaced what might seem a banal expression by ‘live in infamy’, which is far more powerful. No stupidity on his part…

No, the stupidity was all down to Japan. 

There was a school of thought in Japan that suggested that, after its successes in China, the country should turn its attention northwards and invade Russia (the Soviet Union at the time).

Imagine how that might have been! I know one shouldn’t go in for ‘what if’ speculations about history – counterfactuals as they’re called – but sometimes it’s hard not to indulge one for a moment.

The Soviet Union was already involved in a desperate struggle with Nazi Germany, which had invaded just under six months earlier. And it truly was desperate, a life and death conflict which had started out looking frighteningly bad for the Soviets. Nazi forces had occupied most of Stalingrad (today Volgograd), they had besieged Leningrad (today St Petersburg) and were close to Moscow (today, perhaps surprisingly, Moscow).

An invasion from the East would have diverted forces from the fight against the German armies, seriously weakening Soviet defences. Germany would fight on for three and a half years after Pearl Harbor, but in effect it lost the war at Stalingrad that winter. If the Soviets had been forced to send forces eastward, things might have turned out far less well for the democracies. 

What’s more, the attack on Pearl Harbor completely altered public attitudes in the US. Up till then, there had been massive opposition to involvement in the war and most voters were firmly committed to maintaining the existing attitude of strict neutrality. After the air raid, there was widespread revulsion at the act and a sense that it wasn’t so much a matter of the US declaring war as of the war having, in effect, already started. As Roosevelt put it, “Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.”

In a second act of stupidity, Hitler also declared war between Germany and the United States. That ensured that the Americans would be as heavily involved in the war in Europe as in the Pacific.

In other words, Japan’s raid, far from advancing its war aims, ensured that it, as well as its Axis partners, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, would ultimately be defeated. As the Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, in overall command of the Pearl Harbor operation, neatly summed it up, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve”.

Yamamoto feared Japan had merely
woken a sleeping giant

Roosevelt said as much.

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

It was true. Both Germany and Japan would be driven to surrender unconditionally. The process would be painful to the US, with close to 300,000 deaths, but it would be far worse for the Japanese with close to ten times that number. Japan would also suffer the only atomic bomb attacks suffered by any country. 

So far, at least.

The eightieth anniversary fell on 7 December 2021. It was an act of massive stupidity by the government of Japan, which made an Allied victory in World War 2 a certainty. You’ve got to wonder how people that dumb could make it into positions that senior.

The lesson, of course, is never to let it happen again, anywhere else. Sadly, though, Britain seems to have done it already and not yet to have seen the error of its ways. As for the US, it had done it up to January of this year, when it kicked out its most lamentable president ever.

The sobering thought for this strange anniversary, however, is whether stupidity has taken root so deeply in the US electorate, as to allow him back in again.