The Japanese Chief of Naval Operations, the non-political Professional Naval Commander was Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, a man who, as a senior military attaché in the 1930s, took his annual Summer vacation spending months driving around America to learn what our country was really like back during the Depression in the 1930s.
In their mad-dash rush to rapidly build the most powerful country and military, the natural-resource-devoid Japanese Empire sought to build bigger and better war machines by conquering resource-rich territories of other countries’ jurisdictions. Such conquests included Manchuria in Northern China, and land and sea territories south of China.
In the hope of keeping the USA from interfering with their Pacific expansion plans, a pre-emptive attack on the American Navy’s forward-based fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was planned and executed.
As luck would have it, our 3 prized aircraft carriers were out on maneuvers and were miraculously spared. The massive battleship surface fleet was devastated – 2,355 American military (2,008 sailors, 218 soldiers, 109 marines) along with 68 civilians were killed. Another 1,178 were wounded.
The attack was executed by Japanese carrier aircraft from a fleet as much as 200 miles away – thereby proving that WW II naval military power dominance had passed from Dreadnaught-Battleship to Aircraft Carriers in the new generation.
When informed by radio at his Inland Sea Headquarters of the failure to destroy the aircraft carriers Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto recorded his eternally famous judgement: “We thought we would take America out of the war – but all we have done is awaken a Sleeping Giant and fill him with a terrible resolve!”
That was 1941, three or four generations of ever-changing Americans ago. The subsequent American policy was PAYBACK and, by example, completely precluding the incentive for Imperial Japan or anyone else to try something like that again.
Sadly, times have dramatically changed in the CHARACTER of America and Western Civilization.
Today’s Political Priorities (in no particular order) are:
- ‘LOWERING TENSIONS’ – not ‘RAISING TENSIONS,’
- The Arbitrary Lawyer determined requirement for putatively ‘LEGAL AND LEGITIMATE PROPORTIONALITY’ in military response,
- The mysteriously secret prior cancellation of the WW II era long-term Geneva Convention Laws of Warfare that previously judged any offensive intentional targeting of or even utilization defensively of civilians as ‘defensive shields’ was a rapidly-enforced capital war crime requiring prompt executions of the war criminals universally identifiable by their individual behavior, and
- Trading captured no-longer-capital war criminals or other captured enemy to secure the return of any and all, living or dead, HOSTAGES!
PS. Can you think of any of today’s ‘military priority policies’ that I forgot?
