December 7, 2007
The Memory of Surprise Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:20 PM EST This is the date that was to live in infamy, although so far December 7, 2007, has passed with little mention of the attack on Pearl Harbor. There is an AP wire story in The New York Times, but nothing by any Times writer, other than a snide throwaway that John McCain tersely mentioned the event a day early on the campaign trail. When I was a kid, December 7 did live, if not wholly in infamy; people remarked on the anniversary of the Japanese attack, older people sometimes with solemnity, younger ones mostly if not entirely in a mildly comical tone. That mildness was testament to the fact that Japan had switched from being a hated enemy to an unthreatening junior ally in a single instant, the moment of the surrender. There was a brief revival of Japanophobia in the eighties, when Japanese economic success seemed to coincide with the end of American economic hegemony, and there were references to economic Pearl Harbors on our auto and consumer electronics industries, but the Japanese economy tanked for what seemed like a decade, and the American economy turned out to be in the middle of a generation-long boom, which is probably why Japanophobia fizzled. While it lasted, it was a little ugly. I remember an alarmist novel by a very popular writer, one that became a movie, and it had a scene of sadistic Japanese tycoons murdering a beautiful blonde American call girl as background to further sneak attacks on our economy, and that seemed to be shades of Fu Manchu. But it was a flash in the pan, and a of couple years ago I threw away half a shelf of economic journalism on the Japanese threat to America; nothing dates faster than ominous previsions of the future. Thinking it over, the perdurable effect of the Pearl Harbor attack was on our Cold War strategic posture, and on our deeper strategic thought. World War II began for Americans with a absolute strategic and tactical surprise, the loss of the core of our Pacific battle fleet in one bloody morning, two battleships sunk and six damaged. By strategic analysis as it then stood, we had sustained a devastating loss, for battleships took years to build. In fact, the two surviving carriers mattered more than the ravaged battle fleet, and the conventional wisdom nowadays is that relative American and Japanese industrial capacity mattered infinitely more than anything that could have happened on December 7. But we remembered that we had been hit by what seemed a bolt from the blue, and those first hours in which the country seemed defenseless. As it happened, our Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, also entered World War II as the victim of devastating strategic and tactical surprise, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941. The effect of the surprise achieved by Hitler was exponentially more deadly than of that achieved by Admiral Nagumo. Fewer than 2,500 Americans were killed at Pearl Harbor, but the first season of Barbarossa saw three million Soviet dead, missing, and captured before the German drive stalled in front of Moscow in December. The memory of the cost of being surprised was a deep trauma for both Soviet and American strategists, even though both countries emerged from the war as absolute victors. Those strategists spent the better part of the next five decades fearing an equivalent strategic surprise and procuring and deploying force structures designed to minimize the possibility. The unnamed memory of Pearl Harbor is almost certainly in the room when American planners debate what to do about Iranian nuclear potential. Surprising the Americans, of course, destroyed the Japanese empire, just as surprising the Soviets annihilated the Third Reich; within a very few years, both initial victories had become the two most Pyrrhic victories in all of history. The defeated seem to very vividly remember what those first victories cost them, for Japan and Germany are now among the least militarist cultures in the modern world. The victors, too, have their memories of those first surprise attacks, and their strategic cultures have been shaped by them as decisively as they have been shaped by anything. So in crucial places we do remember Pearl Harbor, even if we may not remember just what we are remembering.
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