The Glade 4.0

70 years ago today, 2,402 Americans died and 1,282 wounded, when Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese.

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/salute

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In time, this too shall pass.

The army that attacked us was of the same force that conquered an enormous part of the world in the Asia-Pacific region. I think they assumed that we would just push over like everyone else.

While I absolutely honor the men, regular patriotic citizens, who gave their selfless service, or even lost their lives , I can't help but be skeptical of our entrance into the War. Roosevelt was a consummate Keynesian globalist, fully believing the broken window fallacy and seeing opportunity for American expansionism, and desperately wanted America to be thrust into WW2. While I don't know that I believe FDR had prior knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack before it occured, seeing objective proof that he did certainly wouldn't surprise me.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

I think it would've been better if we stayed out of the war. I think their empires would have collapsed anyways, in the way of Soviet Russia, or become much better behaved like People's Republic of China.

We also destroyed an enormous amount of infrastructure and disrupted markets across the world, which greatly hurt the global economy.

But somehow it turned into good versus evil.

That's because it was good versus evil. We didn't need to be all that good to be a hell of a lot better than Japan or Germany at that time. "Good vs. Evil" does not mean the good are perfect.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Generally when you want to get thrust into a war, you don't start it by getting a bunch of your battleships sunk.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Americans at the time of WW2 had a much more isolationist mentality. They, overwhelmingly, showed little support for America's involvement in the War. It required a direct attack on American soil in order to begin the beat of the American War Drum. Additionally, with FDR's belief in the reliability of the broken window theory, sunken battleships simply created a need to build more battleships, which in his mind was good for the economy.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

You should read up on this. Isolationists were very much in the minority. Non-interventionalists (somewhat different, and inclusive of isolationists) were also in the minority in 1940. However, they had strong support in Congress, which is why everyone thinks this. There was no "overwhelming" isolationism. Most realized that Germany was a serious threat, and the pre-war draft was very popular.

The conspiracy theorists will tell you that the "powers that be" knew battleships were obsolete so they deliberately moved the important aircraft carriers out and let the relatively useless battleships get sunk in order to provide the excuse.

That's completely ridiculous for a variety of reasons. First and foremost is that if we knew it was coming, we could have achieved better public support by being attacked, but demonstrating that we can kick Japan's *** in the proposed war.

Now, that's not to say we didn't expect something, we did. But we were caught by surprise.

Battleships sinking wouldn't have mattered to an early Keynesian. It would have been a boon to the economy in his eyes.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

What about the lives lost?

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

It's hardly "beating the war drum" when your battle fleet has been surprise attacked and several islands you posess have been invaded.



That's hardly anything that would go through FDR's mind, since all 10 of the new battleships commissioned during the war were all on order by 1939. More could not have been built any faster without sacrificing the ability to build aircraft carriers. In any case, that would have been silly since battleships take a long time to build and you might lose the war before the new ones are ready. FDR's thinking was not dominated by any economic ideas to the exclusion of what was physically possible.

In practice, 10 battleships was all we could build, because the Pearl Harbor attack, combined with the sinking of Repulse and Prince of Wales a few days later, plus the fact that the timing of the Parl Harbor attack made carriers the only available major warships in the Pacific for some time and thus rapidly illustrated the value of the carrier - but that value was not at all apparent to FDR prior to the attack because naval thinking still focused on the battleship as the decisive naval weapon and FDR hardly posessed the naval expertise to dispute his admirals. Had the Japanese not had a forward-thinking man like Yamamoto, the war probably would have begun with a more pedestrian invasion and eventual confrontation between battle fleets.

Granted, a confrontation between battle fleets at that time would have been rough with no new battleships available, but it would certainly have left the Japanese battlefleet seriously weakened as well, allowing us to bring our industrial power into play.

Not only that but the role of the BB is consistently underrated in WWII. While the carrier was decisive, battleships were not as vulnerable as is often thought when underway and properly escorted, especially with the massive AA armament that was later added. Pearl Harbor did not demonstrate the vulnerability of battleships; carriers would have been sunk with equal ease in the harbor. Repulse and Prince of Wales demonstrated that - but they only demonstrated it in the case of battleships that were inadequately escorted and lacked sufficient AA armament of their own. To be fair, everyone inadequately armed ships for AA at the start of the war; the amount needed was only reflected in later AA armament improvments, mostly done by us.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yes they would. There is no such thing as a "Keynesian" that thinks only of the theoretical economic impact while ignoring the military impact. Now your enemy has an advantage of 8 battleships in the short term, 4 battleships in the mid term, and 2 battleships in the long term. A battleship is a major national asset and you can't just say "we'll order a new battleship"; you might lose the war by then. You can only build so many battleships at one time; you need certain harbor facilities and the appropriate type of steel for armor can only be produced so fast. It isn't simply a matter of dollars and economic activity; we're talking about a warship that is at minimum 30,000 tons and is a major strategic asset.

Iowa was ordered in 1939 and not actually comissioned until 1943. By the time Pearl Harbor happened, every new battleship that was to be built in the war was on order, as were the first Essex class fleet carriers. This represented a rebuilding of naval power that had been horribly neglected in the post-WWI arms control idiocy; while economic stimulus was needed and was a reason, the ships themselves were desperately needed as WWI battleships were wearing out and inadequate against modern battleships, and previous aircraft carriers revealed their flaws as early designs.

Had Pearl Harbor losses been any sort of impetus for battleship building or large carrier building, we would not have been utterly ****. Yamamoto would have had 18-24 months to run wild instead of the 6 he predicted.

Then, of course, there's the fact that if you know the attack is coming, you can ambush the attackers, win (or at least inflict serious losses) and start the war in a lot better position, and still justify a whole lot of carriers and battleships because there's still a war on, and lose a whole lot less lives in the process, both of defeating the attack and fighting the war in general.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

This is idiotic, since the "powers that be" were battleship admirals, had ordered no less than 10 new battleships and still believed the battleship the decisive weapon (although the aircraft carrier was steadily gaining importance in their estimation). The events that demonstrated the "obsolete" nature of the battleship were Pearl Harbor and the sinking of Repulse and Prince of Wales (actually the more important event, since the British ships were fully underway and ready for combat, while Pearl Harbor was a surprise) had not occured yet.

Even those events did not demonstrate that the battleship was nearly as obsolete as is often thought. The battleship was simply the unfortunate victim in the surprise attack that is often all the average person knows of actual WWII engagements. Battleships provided important service later in the war, and not just in shor bombardment. They also lost their only opportunity for a true battle fleet engagement due to Halsey's stupidity.

The advent of the guided missile restored the importance of the surface combatant, and "battleships" could still have a role to play, although they would not resemble the battleships of WWII very closely. Indeed, the Iowa was the most powerful surface combatant in the world even in the 1980s, able to fling twice as many antiship missiles (although slower ones) as a Kirov and which no other ship could hope to confront within 20 miles (a range that could have been etended to 50 miles were some of the proposed subcaliber ammunition projects completed). The Iowa was ultiamtely retired because it was simply too expensive to operate, given the inability to cost-effectively give it an area-defense SAM system and the end of the cold war.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Well, sure, if you're willing to ignore the industrial changes that take place when converting to a domestic industrial production economy to a war economy, and refuse to take into accont the massive Keynesianism "boom" that created, sure. But then you'd have to admit to not understanding the underlying theory, so I'll just go ahead and hold my breath.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

While I'm all about learning from history and understanding the importance of it. I really don't get the relevance of marking this anniversary 70 years later.

It was our ticket into the last war we decisively won.

Yep, we're turning into France.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

I don't need to admit to anything. Economic theory has nothing to do with it. I'm not even contesting with your basic assertion of Roosevelt's economic philosophy, just the degree to which you think it would drive his actions.

No amount of "boom" and no shift in the economy could possibly have made us able to produce any additional battleships any faster. There's only so much steel available, and while you could build new mills and mine more iron, that takes time. You need to have the harbor slips to build those battleships and carriers.. and there are only so many harbors available with building slips. You can make more slips, but only in certain places and there are only so many places, and those places need to have a decent-sized city nearby due to the ancillary needs of a shipyard.. and those slips also need to produce large numbers of escort ships, submarines, transports, and other ships in addition to your capital ships, and repair damaged ships to boot.

As it was, we couldn't even finish 2 battleships by the end of the war, Illinois and Kentucky as well as not completing 4 of the 6 planned Alaska class battle cruisers, so I don't know how in the hell you can possibly think there was any more capacity to build more battleships to replace those lost at Pearl Harbor, especially when 6 of them were repaired and returned to action anyhow. It's not as if we could have built any more if we didn't repair those, or we somehow would have completed any fewer if we'd avoided a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor; we maxxed out our capacity starting 10 new ones from 1937 to 1939 and we had 2 that we simply couldn't get done.

You're focusing on economic theory at the expense of what was physically possible. Let's look at total production of war materiel:

22 large aircraft carriers
119 other aircraft carriers
10 battleships (Including 2 North Carolinas technically comissioned in 1941, several months before hostilities, but in anticipation of them)
48 cruisers of all types (including 2 battle cruisers)
349 destroyers
420 convoy escorts of various types
203 submarines
33.9 million tons of variosu merchant shipping

This doesn't include enormous numbers of small amphibious assault craft, nor those ships not actually completed during the war such as the aforementioned Illinois and Kentucky. I don't know how you think that having 8 additional elderly battleships, 1 additional ex-battleship used for gunnery practice (Utah) and 2 additional destroyers as well as a number of P-40 fighters would really have meaningfully decreased this construction and the attendant "boom".

In addition to that we produced:

23,119 light tanks
8,068 other light armored fighting vehicles
68,864 medium tanks
2,202 heavy tanks
3,740 very heavy bombers (presumably the B-29; unclear what this classification means but it was in a category all its own)
31,685 heavy bombers
21,461 medium bombers
39,986 light bombers
99,465 fighters
4,106 recon aircraft
95,516 support aircraft of various types

Considered in addition to naval production, it is impossible to see how not getting sneak-attacked at Pearl Harbor would really have decreased this in a meaningful fashion. Not only that, but had the damage at Pearl Harbor been significantly worse (there were valuable targets untouched such as fuel depots and the submarine pens, and of course the valuable carriers could have been present) I don't see how you think production could ahve been meaningfully higher.

What you're missing is that even if replacing damaged ships from a sneak attack would have fit into FDRs economic views (and I don't disagree), it wasn't phyiscally possible to build anymore battleships than were already on order anyhow,. More importantly, the scale of war production was already so high that having the battle fleet available would hardly have decreased any Keynesian "boom" from war production - especially when you consider that some of those battleships would have been lost in any confrontation with the Japanese fleet, since those WWI relics were hardly suited to confront Yamato and Musashi without suffering serious damage at best.

Try to not view everything in terms of it fitting into economic ideology. It makes you sound like a fanatic. Regardless of what economic theory you adhere to, when you start a war, if you can have 8 battleships or 0 battleships, any fool can see it's better toha8.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

We decisively won in Desert Storm.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Relevance to what? We mark almost every major historical occasion on 10 year increments when it's been less than 100 years since it occured. This was a major historical event for this country, and survivors still live.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I disagree DE, we accomplished the mission allowed us and left. We left Hussein in power and Iraq as an enemy state. This was not winning.

we could have won relatively easily at that point, but it would have cost us a whole slew of allies.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

Yes it was. Our stated political objective was to eject Iraq from Kuwait. We did so, with minimal losses and while inflicting massive losses on the enemy. We did this while preserving good political relations throughout the conflict with our allies, which would not have happened had we gone on to eject Saddam from power. Iraq remained an enemy, but a crippled one we could deal with at leisure and which could no longer threaten neighboring allies in a meaningful way.

When you accomplish your stated political objectives and your enemy doesn't, you win. When you do it with minimal casualties of your own and massive casualties on his side, you won decisively; even more than decisively. Because you didn't accomplish some other objective you didn't intend to at that time that seems like it might possibly have been a good idea in hindsight does not mean you didn't win. It would have been really nice to remove Stalin from power after WWII and make the USSR a friendly country, or at least not a threat, too, but that wasn't our objective and the fact that we didn't doesn't mean we didn't win decisively. The same applies in Desert Storm. We accomplished what we wanted, the enemy didn't, and we won.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."