PEARL HARBOR

The Axis propagandists had caricatured America as helplessly splintered by race, ethnicity, class, and creed; as a pampered, luxury-loving society in which the only cause that aroused the people was the pursuit of the almighty dollar; as a nation of loafers and malingerers, overpaid, overfed, and over-enfranchised, in which politicians went with hats in hand to receive the benediction of union bosses. To their eyes, the United States was a sprawling, individualistic, leisure-loving nation, strung out on jazz, movies, baseball, comic strips, horse racing, and radio comedies—anything but work, and certainly not the work of marching off to war. 

It was a nation enfeebled by divided government, with power impotently shared by the president and Congress and law courts, all constantly put upon by an insolent, unbridled press. Americans were a parochial, self-absorbed, inward-looking people, who could not care less about the rest of the world, who would never consent to spill a drop of blood to defend England, the villainous oppressor of their revolutionary heritage; or Russia, the nerve center of global communism; or any part of Asia, a place so distant and alien it could have been in another galaxy. 

The critique was shallow and disingenuous, a collage of crude stereotypes and half-truths. But even in America one heard self-criticism along similar lines, and the nation was clearly unprepared to confront the Axis in 1941. The American people did not like the naked aggression of Germany and Japan, and a majority favored Roosevelt’s policy of providing munitions and material support to their victims. But entering the war was a very unpopular prospect. In a Gallup poll taken less than two months before Pearl Harbor, only 17 percent of Americans had favored war with Germany. There was open talk of mass desertions from the army, encapsulated in the mutinous acronym “OHIO,” or “Over the hill in October.” 

In August, the House had voted to extend the peacetime draft by the 1-vote margin of 203 to 202. The isolationist movement actually grew stronger in the weeks leading up to Pearl Harbor, with its leaders shouting to packed public halls that Roosevelt was conspiring to foment war with the Axis. By 1941, the president saw that war was coming but could do nothing more than he had already done to change the temper of the American people. He could only wait for some inciting incident or provocation. “The turning point,” Hitler had called the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. “A complete shift in the general world picture,” Goebbels had concluded. 

They were right, but not in the sense they intended. Before December 7, 1941, the American industrial economy, lying completely beyond the reach of Axis bombers or armies, had been the single best hope of the embattled Allies. Only by militarizing that economy, harnessing it entirely to war production, could the power of the Axis be destroyed. But the sprawling republic would never be mobilized or militarized without the consent of the American people. “There was just one thing that they [the Japanese] could do to get Roosevelt completely off the horns of the dilemma,” wrote the presidential speechwriter Bob Sherwood, “and that is precisely what they did, at one stroke, in a manner so challenging, so insulting and enraging, that the divided and confused American people were instantly rendered unanimous and certain.” If the Second World War could be said to have pivoted on a single point, it was not the Battle of Britain, or El Alamein, or Stalingrad, or the fall of Italy. Pearl Harbor, by giving Roosevelt the license to do what needed to be done, sealed the fate of both Germany and Japan.

Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 (Vol. 1) (The Pacific War Trilogy): War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942 (61-62). (Function). Kindle Edition.