The Day America Went Global

The world, and especially the nation, remembered Pearl Harbor last Wednesday. December 7 is, indeed, a day that has lived “in infamy." So the president and the man who will follow him into the White House both issued appropriate statements. A moving ceremony took place at the scene of the attack, with a 94-year-old survivor from the USS Arizona honored and speaking. Among those killed in the attack were 1,177 of his shipmates. A flight of planes, in the missing man formation, passed overhead and taps was played by a Navy band. Hard, even if you were merely watching on television, to keep the emotions down.

A day or two earlier, the prime minister of Japan had announced that he would soon be making a visit to Pearl Harbor. Not to apologize, it was quickly made clear, but as a gesture toward "healing."

So Pearl Harbor has, indeed, been remembered. And this is undeniably right and proper and, one would hope, wise. But one does wonder if, perhaps, while the event is remembered and commemorated, we may be on the way to forgetting its lessons. Not so much those about preparedness but those about a dangerous world and America's place in it.

Seventy-five years ago, much of the world was at war. In the United States, which was not, there were those who believed that America would be fighting, sooner or later, that this was inevitable, and possibly even desirable, when it came to Nazi Germany. Hitler's objective was world conquest and empire. He had taken out France, which was reputed to have the world's largest and finest army. He had chased British troops off the continent, forcing them to leave most of their equipment behind as they abandoned the beaches of Dunkirk in anything that could make it across the channel. The Royal Air Force had held its own, barely, during the Battle of Britain, and an invasion of the British Isles seemed, for the moment, unlikely—the Germans were tied up in Russia, where they had advanced to within sight of the spires of Moscow before winter and counterattacks by troops rushed in from Siberia had stopped them. Still, the prospects for defeating Germany were uncertain, bordering on bleak, especially if the United States remained out of the fight. And a world ruled by Germany and Hitler was insupportable.

The United States was assisting the British. "Short of war," some might insist, but not very short. The U.S. Navy was engaged, clandestinely, in the fight against German U-boats in the Atlantic. And the Roosevelt administration was resupplying the British through the Lend-Lease Act and such measures as the exchange of 50 obsolete destroyers for a lease on bases in Newfoundland and the Caribbean. Still …