history and impermanence

7 December

We Yanks are known generally to find history useless because the FUTURE is what matters. The future for thousands of Americans and millions of Asians disappeared over a 90 minute period on this date in 1941 but I strongly doubt most of us give the date much thought.

Today, of course, is the 83rd anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. I remember being shocked in 2021 when I read that a Pearl Harbor veterans group was ending their annual commemorations. It took me a couple of moments to register that virtually none of them were left to attend, to receive our eternal thanks. That doesn’t mean we should not remember but they are no longer here to remind us. We must rely on that dreaded “history”.

I grew up in a family with three of us obsessed with history. My mother didn’t fit the pattern but my father raised my brother and me on the meat and potatoes of history and geography. We never left the dinner table, particularly while we lived in Colombia in the 1960s, that we did not play the “history and geography” game which began with “I’m thinking of a state (or date)….” My brother and I had to figure out what he was teaching us through linkages to other clues. It sounds tiresome, I suppose, but our father demanded we know things that were important—at least to him. A man born in an Ozark hamlet of fewer than 10 (six of whom in his family), he had risen far beyond what he might have expected so he was not going to provide us anything less than the tools to appreciate the world we lived in.

He was not at Pearl Harbor, having graduated from high school earlier that spring. My father was trying to make ends meet at a small college which had offered him a small but wholly inadequate stipend to study math. Once the attack occurred, he enlisted, in the Army Air Corps, along with millions of his fellow citizens.

He was a Signals guy but he saw so much of the war. I wish I had taken notes of exactly where he served in the Pacific but once I knew he had been one of the handful of non-Marines landing on Iwo Jima with the Marines, I confess I stopped paying attention. He really rarely talked about his experiences in the war so perhaps I didn’t miss as much as I think. I do know two things set him off: the idea that the Russians alone won World War II as if the U.S. efforts were insignificant (as one of my college professors asserted) and the proposition the Bomb was a bad thing. His catch phrase for so much in life was “it’s all relative”, probably in this case because he was scheduled to go onto the Home Islands had we invaded Japan in 1945.

The war was devastating for thousands of our soldiers and sailors maimed or killed in the Pacific—and the Atlantic, of course. It was a global conflict in two pretty distinct spheres but always interrelated because of the resources under President Roosevelt’s, then Truman’s, control. The country—our country’s—changed forever in so many ways.

But millions of others around the world died as well. World War II in Asia did not begin on 8 December 1941 with our Congressionally-mandated declaration of war against Japan. The Imperial Japanese had begun that conflict fully a decade earlier when they invaded the three northeastern provinces of China, taking them under the pretext of a Chinese incident of unrest at Mukden. Treating these provinces as a “protectorate”, the Japanese controlled “Manchukuo” as their own for fully a generation, until Japan surrendered in defeat. A full on Nikkei invasion of the mainland followed six years later.

Our relationship with Chiang Kai-shek, an obstreperous nationalist concerned far more about the long-term war against the Communists, became our ally when we pumped millions of dollars into the Republic of China war effort to assure the Japanese faced another front. Japanese forces treated a large swath of occupied territory as inhabited by subhumans—inflicting deliberate pain and murdering at will, most notably perhaps with the “Rape of Nanjing” in late 1937. Estimates of uniformed war dead and wounded range between 3 and 4 million while civilian casualties from direct assault, hunger, disease, and so much more are even higher.

Japan’s attack on 7 December coincided with military strikes and immediate surrenders across much of Asia. Japan already controlled Taiwan (which escaped the war perhaps better than anyone) and Korea after 1910. No wonder this is a conflict known to many as Asia’s Holocaust, though the Chinese claim unique victimization by establishing a Nanjing Holocaust museum with hauntingly similar reminders to those of the Nazi Holocaust reminders in the west. The conflict Japan unleashed went as far west as British-governed Burma, into Dutch Indonesia, the U.S. colony of the Philippines, and Britain’s Malaya (which then included Singapore) and Hong Kong. Northern Australia worried the Japanese expansion would engulf them, though General MacArthur and U.S. forces (operating with temporary hosts in Australia) after their ouster from the Philippines never faced direct attack on the Aussie shores.

The campaign to win back these territories, often at the behest of the colonizers still intending to rule in the region as if nothing had changed, was a slow, deliberate, and costly one. Wikipedia, an admittedly uncertain source but including links to citations, lists 26 million civilian deaths along with military casualties in every portion of the region. With U.S. Indo-Pacific the largest combatant command by far today, one begins to appreciate how vast the efforts to drive the Imperial Japanese back to the Home Islands to force surrender.

The entire effort, shockingly when one considers another contemporaneous violent struggle was competing for scarce resources in Europe, took less than four years. The United States was the facilitating banker and weapons engine for both theaters. We focus on the future because we have proven exquisitely good at concerted, national goals when given the consensus.

We also saw ourselves, as a result, as the key to preventing any future comparable conflict. We thus set out to create a new permanent governing model, under our leadership and often with our funds, for the globe that the foreign policy and business community believed would preserve peace for our national security interests in perpetuity. It just so happened that community also sought to increase trade, alliances, and shared values as methods of preserving this new global arrangement. These same individuals also chose to ignore the reality that the rebuilding of entire societies—rebuilding we paid for, orchestrated, and supported—would have long term consequences.

Today, we are at the end of that community, by all indications. A different governing party since 1949, the CCP believes precisely as Chiang Kai-sheik did that China’s role as a Confucian traditional power represents the center of the global system. We believe we alone will preserve peace under our auspices and our values. Those two systems do not work well together, though neither can entirely abandon the other.

Japan is our mutual defense partner of seventy years following our wartime enemy for fourteen. South Korea stands against North Korean aggression, with both a world class economy and a strongly internationalized defense arrangement with us dating back 74 years. We have other mutual defense treaties, including one with the Philippines, our sole colony until we allowed independence a year following the war’s end. Australia and New Zealand are mutual defense treaty allies along with Singapore a valued partner in this region. Southeast Asia is a place where we care what happens but have never created the permanence of relationships despite the investment of nearly 60,000 lives in Vietnam. We have a long-standing understanding with Thailand but even that has its ups and downs.

Too few Americans understand this history, much less the ramifications of each and every piece of it. Instead, too many have tired of a system that no longer suits our needs without recognizing that permanent winner and losers never exist in the international system. It’s a dynamic world where human behavior, nation-state interests, governing objectives, and occasional coincidental goals crash against one another every minute of every day.

But we also forget that by having paid so much—in blood and treasure—of the bill after 7 December 1941, we have had an outsized say in that future we all worry about. That will be less true when we abandon the less than perfect system in seeking the unknown.

Actions create consequences seems all I ever talk about—and I suppose it is. World War I fed the flames that became World War II. Japan’s desires to look like a western power had impacts on Asia that reverberate such China’s and Korea’s hatred in response to what was done there.

We approached providing a permanent global peace with good intentions but they butted against both aspirations of others along with our own naïveté about our uniqueness in world history. No two conflicts end precisely the same nor do two states have identical aspirations or tolerances.

If we knew more of how we got to where we are, perhaps we would see the world differently. Then again, that might not be the case, either. We do have a seemingly unique vision of the future that discards the past. I wonder whether the future can similarly discard the past?

I welcome your thoughts on Pearl Harbor day. I thank the millions of families who committed so much to the wars since 7 December 1941. I want to hear your rebuttals, questions, observations, and suggestions so please do send them. I am a single voice but one that sees history and geography as important stuff, in an era where few others do.

I appreciate your time on this December Saturday. If you find this of value, please feel free to circulate it. I appreciate those of you who read any or every day, especially those who commit as subscribers to this column.

Be well and be safe. FIN

“Pacific War”, Wikipedia.org, 7 December 2024, retrieved at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_War