The Written Word
for December 6, 2000

Tomorrow is Pearl Harbour Day. It was 49 years ago that the Japanese fleet air arm attacked the Pacific Fleet of the US Navy as it laid peacefully, and hung over that otherwise quiet Sunday Morning.

President Franklin Roosevelt, the following day, called December 7^th a “Day that will live in infamy.”

It’s interesting to note that many think and even more suspect that Roosevelt either wanted that attack to come or in fact connived at its occurrence. There is no doubt that the president was trying to maneuver the Americans closer and closer to war on the side of Britain. He’d already signed into law the first peace time draft of American men and had, earlier in the year, promoted and signed the “Lend-Lease” Act which the beleaguered Churchill called the “most unsordid” act in history.

I don’t believe that Roosevelt connived in the destruction of so much of the US fleet and the deaths of nearly 2000 Americans. He was a wily politician, no question of that. And he did like to get his way. But I believe that Roosevelt saw as his casus belli an attack on the Philippines.

What is undoubtedly true is that the entry of America into the war made it’s outcome certain. When Churchill, at the Prime ministerial country home, Chequers, heard the news he exclaimed “so we’ve won after all.”

The attack on Pearl Harbour galvanized Americans into action. It roused what Admiral Yamamoto (who led the Japanese attack) called with unerring accuracy, “the sleeping giant.” From that moment forward the industrial might of the United States, greater than the rest of the world combined, was directed along military lines with devastating consequences for the Axis, as Germany, Italy and Japan were called.

This industrial might depended upon science and science gave the world its first atomic bomb thus commencing the Atomic Age and, from Nazi Germany, the means by which to deliver them pilotlessly.

49 years ago tomorrow an act of war had incalculable results the end of which we have by no means yet seen.

Some of the issues remain unsettled. Some of the powers are gone, namely Britain and France. Some of the powers, including the three Axis powers returned to prosperity with amazing quickness. Two of the powers became super powers and now, nearly 50 years later, the United States is the world power.

Whatever else it might mean, December 7, 1941 was a day that ushered in a new era.