S3 E26 - Pearl Harbor Attack Ushers In An Era of World Peace

Eighty three years ago the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.  While at the same time negotiating for peace, the evil Japanese Government mounted a sneak attack, designed to kill as many Americans as possible, without a declaration of war. That attack was the beginning of the end of WWII,  and the war itself heralded a long period of peace, thanks to the United States.  The greatest war in a long progression of Eastern-Hemisphere wars, it has been so far the last of its kind, thanks to the benevolence of the United States. 

Commentary on trending issues brought to you with a moderate perspective.

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Introduction: Pearl Harbor and World Peace

The Tenth Man: Pearl Harbor leads to world peace December 6th, 2024.

Today in history, the Japanese attacked the U. S. at Pearl Harbor. This victory for Japan was an even greater victory for the Allies and for world peace. How Pearl Harbor led to decades of peace and prosperity, thanks to the United States, today, on The Tenth Man.

Historical Context: Pearl Harbor and WWII

The Tenth Man: 83 years ago, the Japanese drew the U. S. into the worst war in human history. And now the Japanese, while enjoying the peace that we provide them, they complain about the atom bomb which ended the war. It's true, Japanese school children are not taught the true history of their country. There's a meme that says World War II history to Japanese children is as follows.

One day, for no reason, the Americans started dropping [00:01:00] atomic bombs on us.

Now, bashing America for the fact that the world is not perfect, it's a fun pastime, and it crosses multiple cultures and countries, and even pervades U. S. culture at times. Okay. But what people don't realize is that ever since Pearl Harbor, the world started down a road of a Pax Americana, an American peace.

And despite the continuing adventures by the Europeans and the Chinese and various nations in the Middle East and in Africa,

everybody in the world, by and large, does enjoy peace. It's a peace such that Well, even boys of my own generation had to worry about being drafted to go to Vietnam. Now the biggest complaint anyone in America, and much of the world has, is they can't get somebody else [00:02:00] to pay for the stuff that they want.

And at the same time, they blame the U. S. for hundreds of incursions. People say that the U. S. has invaded Vietnam. Hundreds of countries and we'll see how the U. S. has never really invaded anyone in the classic sense. We'll look at that myth and a lot of other myths surrounding World War II and show how and why the world owes the U.

S. a great debt for the peace that it enjoys now.

Myth Busting: Misconceptions About WWII

The Tenth Man: Let's start with myth number one, calling it a world war. Calling it World War II is a misnomer. That's a myth because it just shows that Europeans are self centered jerks. And I apologize for using the word jerks. I wanted to use the term a holes, but that's really too vulgar. So we'll just stick with jerks.

And we can all be jerks as individuals or as [00:03:00] countries from time to time, but the Europeans are the worst. So what is it that makes your war a world war? The Earth has five continents, five landmasses, and this war was all on one of them. One single landmass, the Eurasian continent. It wasn't in Antarctica, it wasn't in the Americas.

It really wasn't in Australia. We'll talk about exceptions to both of those. And it was somewhat in Africa, but not mostly. And even though we used a lot of ships and airplanes in the war, still, you could basically drive from every battlefield to every other battlefield.

By car, truck, or railroad.

And also, much of the world was enjoying total peace. A lot of nations were sucked into the war reluctantly, but [00:04:00] some basically enjoyed peace. Most of South America. And while the effects of the war spilled over into much of the world, still, it was more by exception.

Take the battle of the river plate in Uruguay. Crowds went out to see the Admiral Graf Spee. Leave port for battle or actually to be scuttled because it was a novelty. 

Global Impact: WWII and American Involvement

The Tenth Man: And although everybody knows that the U. S. was part of the war, even people who don't know very much history still know that we were a part of World War II, but they forget that at the beginning the U. S. wanted no part of the war. We didn't know which side to support. At the beginning it was Hitler fighting Stalin.

Thousands of Americans, German Americans in particular, thought that Hitler was going to be doing us a favor by start, by fighting Stalin. They were both evil. 

Still, we're not stupid. We were able to discern which side was good and which side was bad. And there was Lend Lease. We, we were [00:05:00] Gave, supposedly lend, but basically gave millions of dollars, billions of dollars in war material and supplies to the other countries. We gave 50 old destroyers, ships to England for convoy escorts.

There's an English movie called The Gift Horse. I recommend you watch it. It gives a story of one of these ships. 

Our Army Air Corps allowed our pilots to resign their commissions and join up with the, the volunteer force in China, the Flying Tigers, and, and fight against the Japanese in China before we were engaged in the war. And while we had American volunteers fighting in China before Pearl Harbor, also, the second myth is that Pearl Harbor was the beginning of our participation in combat.

Americans helped the British to escort convoys across the Atlantic to England in the face of the U boat threat. So many weeks before Pearl Harbor, we were, we were involved [00:06:00] in combat. On September 4th, the Germans attempted to torpedo, and America allowed pilots to resign their commissions, Army Air Corps pilots to resign their commissions and join the volunteer force in China, flying with Colonel Chennault, Chennault, I think they pronounced it, with the Chinese fighting against the Japanese.

And along with this early involvement in the war, there was also official involvement.

And so myth number two is that Pearl Harbor was the beginning of U. S. armed forces involvement in World War II.

 The U. S. Navy was helping the English to escort convoys across the Atlantic. They would escort them halfway to, to Iceland. And as a result, the Germans attempted to torpedo the USS Greer weeks before Pearl Harbor. That was on September 4th. Later, they succeeded. They torpedoed the USS Kearney on October 17th.

So the Navy [00:07:00] is always the first to fight. During our wars, unlike what the Marines say, that they're the first to fight, it's usually the Navy. The Kearney was torpedoed and 11 sailors were killed. Then on Halloween 1941, the USS Reuben James was sunk by a German U boat. So, weeks before Pearl Harbor, and that was lost with all hands.

So, before Pearl Harbor even, the Nazis were starting to drag us into the war, similar to how they eventually dragged Brazil into the war by torpedoing their ships, their neutral ships.

Racism and WWII: A Closer Look

The Tenth Man: Myth number three is that America was fighting a racist war, that we are racist against the Japanese. Well, this attitude is pure projection. America, Oh, sure. America is racist. Aren't we all, but as always, America is the least racist country. It's the other countries that are being the real jerks [00:08:00] is the word we were going to use. Racist. America is so racist that we kept minorities out of combat while England and France exploited their colonials. Colonials, colonialism itself being a racist concept. And those colonies, colonies in the far East, those were Japan's justification for starting the war.

And racist Japan wanted to get the white man out of Asia. Meanwhile, in Japan, they sent thousands of Koreans to their deaths as slave labor. When the Marines landed on Iwo Jima, or Peleliu, or wherever, many of the people they encountered and ended up killing would have been Korean slaves, who were subhumans to the Japanese.

Oh, and still are today. Japan's dirty little secret. And Japan also forced Korean women into forced labor. Well, forced into forced [00:09:00] prostitution, that's a little bit redundant, but they forced women into prostitution. Remember, these people we're talking about, the ones who were not sent to their deaths, they're still alive.

There's no one in America who has been put through what the Japanese put their racist victims, victims of racism through. Truth be told, there were actually two so called master races in World War II, the Japanese and of course the Germans, because we don't want to forget, of course, the Holocaust and how the Germans thought they were the super race and that anybody that they killed in the Slavic nations, Slavic is where we get the word slave, were subhuman and didn't matter.

And we'll talk about how many of those were killed as a result later in the program. 

America's Role in Winning WWII

The Tenth Man: The fourth myth is that America didn't win the war. And this comes up all the [00:10:00] time in social media where, oh Americans you think you won all the wars because your war movies only show Americans in it. Well one benefit of Technology and CGI, etc.

is that there are now a lot of movies made by other countries depicting their role in the war. And there are movies about Russians and Latvians and Norwegians and Indians, India Indians. And you'll note that those countries are making movies about their own fighting men as well, just like the U. S. does. 

But the truth be told, it was the U. S. that won the war. The arguments often made that, well, it's Russia that won the war because they did all the fighting on the Eastern Front, and they lost the most people. Well, the trouble that argument is, it doesn't count when it was [00:11:00] you who started the war.

There would not have been a World War II in Europe. Had Stalin and Hitler not agreed not to attack one another.

Stalin's commitment to Hitler is what enabled Hitler to invade Poland in the first place. Then you look at all the other European countries, the ones who are supposedly so so wonderful now. There's Finland. Well, talk about Russia. Well, Russia signed the non aggression pact with the Nazis, and then what'd they do?

They turned around and invaded Finland. So now you have Finland fighting against the Russians, except the Russians are supposedly on our side. So which side was Finland on? Then you have Norway. Similarly, Norway tried to stay neutral, which meant they actually traded with the Nazis or collaborated with the Nazis, not fully voluntarily, but there were SS units that were formed just of Norwegians.

Sweden traded with the Germans as did the Swiss. [00:12:00] Spain, they'd just been through a civil war, so they stayed neutral. Neutral meant friendly to the Nazis. Ireland was neutral. France, well, France fought on both sides. And as we said, one of the complaints against the U S is that not enough of us died as compared to the Russians.

Well, funny thing about it,

this war began with the French.

Outside of Russia, France was the largest nation involved, and yet we lost more dead than did the French. More American soldiers died in World War II than did French. So, figure that one out. There's England and Canada. Now, they kind of came out good in the war, except for the draft riots in Canada, where people protested having to go to fight England's war.

And then England, we talked about India. England used Indians to fight in the war, but then didn't support them after the war. Canada, well, racist Canada. They interned all [00:13:00] their Japanese citizens. Australia, well, of course Australia fight. They were in Japan's sights. In fact, Darwin was bombed by Japan.

They didn't have any choice in the matter.

Coming back to the number of people who died, well, You see, what Americans would do is if there was a sniper suspected to be hiding in a church or some other building, rather than send a patrol to get them and possibly get killed or send out a decoy, we'd call it an artillery barrage. We'd send in bombers.

We were trying not to have our men get killed. So it's a dumb argument. But besides, people just don't know some of the huge, gross, obscene numbers of deaths in World War II. So this dumb argument about more, more Russians died than Americans, well of course they did. More Russians died at just the Battle of Stalingrad, a battle most people don't even know about.

It took place before we entered the [00:14:00] war. More Russians died at Stalingrad than in all America's World War II dead. This is important for a concept of peace. Did I say Russians? I meant Germans. More Germans died at Stalingrad than in all America's World War II death. So this is very important when we talk about what is peace.

Actually, no, I misspoke either Germans or Russians, either one more died at Stalingrad, just one battle than all of America's World War II war dead. So hope that's sinking in. 

And then there's the matter of that war in the Pacific. And if you're a European, maybe you didn't know about this, but there was a war with Japan going on at the same time.

That's the, the reason for this, for this whole podcast, you see, because we had a battle called the battle of Iwo Jima and there's a Marine Corps Memorial in Washington, DC. That depicts the raising of the flag on Mount [00:15:00] Suribachi. And you know, the funny thing about Iwo Jima, it was all Americans. There were no Tommies there.

There were no Frenchies. There were no Aussies. It was all Americans. And we had to attack Tokyo and everybody knows about the 8th Air Force in the United States or the 15th Air Force coming out of Africa. And we know about the RAF fighting the Germans. But the thing about these bombing raids over Tokyo, there were no RAF raids.

It was all U. S. Army Air Force. In fact, after the Battle of Savo Island in late 1942, the French, Dutch, and British were all basically gone from the Pacific War. So they weren't there for any of the island hopping. Now the Aussies and the New Zealanders, they participated, at least up until you get to say, New Guinea and Borneo.

They didn't do much past that, other than the their air forces did. So the Aussies and the New Zealanders helped, [00:16:00] but Look at a map. It was right there. Japan could have conquered Australia if they didn't fight back. So just look at a map and yes, you'll see why the Australians and New Zealanders were still fighting.

Other than that, it was all us, all the United States. And speaking of a map, what about Russia? Where was Russia in the Pacific? Russia And Japan were historic enemies and rivals. In fact, one of the problems the Axis had was that when, when Hitler signed his non aggression pact with Russia, the Japanese were looking at that and going, what?

Because the Russians are right at their back door. The Russians and the Japanese are fighting over islands to this day. And they had just fought a war in 1905, just a few years prior. [00:17:00] And Russia could reach Japan's armies by railroad and by truck. So while simultaneously boasting that they won World War II, they took no action against Japan.

None, whatsoever. Well, they did. After the two atomic bombs were dropped. Then they invaded. Then and only then. And if any of our flyers had to land in Russia, they were interned, or their airplanes were interned. The flyers were eventually returned, but they kept our airplanes.

So when the Japanese attack took place on December 7th, 1941, the World War had been underway for at least two years or far more, depending on how you count. And yet, the United States all by itself reversed the course of the Pacific War. Six months later, precisely six months later at the Battle of Midway, and the [00:18:00] U. S. then maintained the offensive until the war's end.

And about that offensive, it's important that the U. S. was always on the offensive. This is important. After Corregidor, we never had the luxury of just waiting for the enemy to come to us. and let them throw themselves against our defenses, our barbed wire, our minefields, while we just hunkered down in a bunker.

Defending is way easier than attacking. They say when you're attacking an enemy force that's dug in, you need to have at least a two to one advantage. Maybe it's three to one. I wasn't infantry. Defending is way easier than attacking, and that's why the Germans and the Japanese cheated when they attacked. They attacked without declaring war first. So from North Africa, to Italy, to Normandy, to Okinawa, America was always on the offensive, was always [00:19:00] at the disadvantage, as we fought other men's war.

It's amusing when people say America has invaded a hundred countries since World War II. People just say this and no one ever disputes it. Are they counting Italy, Tunisia, France, and Guadalcanal in those numbers? Because the U. S. has never invaded anyone in the real sense. By real sense we mean, take Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait.

He killed innocent defenders as he stole art and valuables and hospital equipment and took it back to his countries. And he did it to get their oil. Then when we invaded Iraq in retaliation, it cost us money. We could do a whole episode on our so called invasions and how much money it's cost us. [00:20:00] They said we were invading Iraq to get his oil.

Well, we didn't get any oil, and we don't need anybody's oil. Again, this is classic projection, because that's what all the other countries do.

We really don't want to be involved in anybody else's wars. I'll tell you a personal story. In 1985, my company sent me to Germany for a month to learn about a system we were purchasing. And while we were there, an associate and I used to hang out in the lounge of a small hotel where we were. And hang out with some GIs who were there because, you know, it's our job to protect Europe from Europeans.

And while we were there, there was a bomb attack against some Americans at Hellenikon Air Force Base in Greece. And the casualty list was in the Stars and Stripes newspaper, which one of the guys had. So I read through the list, because reading the list is what I do, and I got halfway through and I said Hey, I know this guy.

So it [00:21:00] was at an Air Force base, and yet there was a sailor that was on the casualty list, a friend of mine, a Navy electrician's mate. He had been in the club when it was bombed. And he was taken to the Air Force Hospital in Kaiserslautern. So that wasn't too far away, a couple hours drive. So I went to see him and he had dozens of cuts and lacerations from shrapnel and glass.

Some minor, some serious, but none of them were life threatening. And the reason he was bombed was because Cypriot rebels were unhappy that the U. S. was not intervening in their dispute with the government of Greece. So this young family man got blasted with a bomb. A guy whose job it is to keep some motors and generators and other electrical devices running at a Navy base.

A base that's intended to protect Europe from the Russians. And he's attacked because two European ethnic groups can't get along with each other and insists that we get [00:22:00] involved in their petty squabble. Petty. It's just over who gets to be in charge.

World War II America, we got sucked into the war with Germany because we tried to send food to England.

Then we got sucked into the war with Japan because we refused to send war materiel for them to use to kill Chinese. So, no, America is not the aggressor. And all the other countries are jerks. 

Post-War Peace and American Influence

The Tenth Man: So, we've had a long peace since World War II, a long peace which is interrupted again by a European war in Ukraine.

No surprise, of course, every 12 years Russia invades some place 12 years after World War II. They invaded Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968. Then Afghanistan, they took a break, then they invaded Crimea. And now here we are, they are invading Ukraine. [00:23:00] Like all these wars, Ukraine's a mixed case. A lot of people forget that the Doha region of Ukraine thinks it's Russian and wishes it was Russian.

And I'm not in favor of Vladimir Putin because he's a jerk, but he has some valid strategic reasons. Napoleon attacked him through Ukraine in the 1800s. Hitler attacked him through Ukraine in the 1940s.

But you look at this period of time since the war and you talk about American aggression? Where is it? And let's look at some numbers.

One of our more famous wars of so called aggression would be Vietnam. Well, Ukraine has lost more soldiers in its few years battling Russia than the U. S. ever lost in Vietnam. And more Russian soldiers have died in this Ukrainian war than the U. S. lost in all of World War II. [00:24:00] So when you talk about American aggression, you should be talking about American peace.

Because the last, the last war that we had to clean up for y'all, World War II, we lost more Marines at Iwo Jima Then all the men, the allies lost in desert storm.

The common man doesn't seem to know these numbers and the people who want to lie to the common man do know, but well, they lie. 

Myth number six is that world war two started in 1939. You know, we think about the invasion when Hitler marched into Poland in 1939. And then of course we got involved two years later, as I said earlier.

I said two years or more before because it actually started much sooner. So let's talk about who is a peaceful nation. It started earlier than Hitler and he was not the aggressor. The first was Italy. In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia. [00:25:00] That was the beginning of World War II. Why did it invade Ethiopia?

Because Ethiopia was the only country in Africa that had not been colonized by. Europe, and we can't have that going on, can we? And from there he tried to seize other British and French colonies in North Africa. And then Japan started. In 1937, they invaded China, actually Manchuria.

Or you could say they started sooner, because they invaded in 1931. They started up, set up a puppet government after a false flag attack.

The Japanese bombed their own railroad tracks, then went and had a fight with the Chinese over it. And they They moved the bodies around so it looked like the Chinese started the fight, took pictures, and that was their justification for invading Manchuria. 

Now when the people say the U. S. is aggressive, They've even invented an index just to [00:26:00] show how bad the U. S. And it's totally contrived. There's an index called the Global Peace Index. And we'll talk about this in other episodes because it's ironic. It's, it's hilarious. The Global Peace Index is something started by an Australian millionaire.

And he's created this index and it's just designed to make the U. S. look bad. It looks at things like, how much do you spend on your armed forces? It's, Well, nobody else spends any, so we got to spend it all for them. And they just make that a bad thing. And we come out on the bottom, we ranked number 132 out of 163 countries in the index.

We're the, one of the worst countries in the world. We are the worst of all the high income countries. And yet. After killing millions of Chinese, we'll talk about how many millions, after killing millions of Chinese, the Japanese are considered very peaceful. They're number 11 on the [00:27:00] list. They started World War II, yet they're number 11 on the peace index list.

And Italy, who helped them start it on the other side of the planet, they're number 33. After starting the worst conflict in history, you just go a few years later and Few years later in historic context and they're more peaceful than we are Here's a fact America has never engaged in a war of conquest That might have got somebody's hackles up, but think before you argue Think before you argue America may have engaged in some ill advised wars of liberation Our war of 1812, we thought Canada wanted to be liberated and they did not and got our butts kicked by Canada.

So But if on the other hand, we wanted to conquer Canada, we [00:28:00] probably could. And so, America, with all its power, remains the most peaceful country in history, relative to its power. And the world has become progressively more peaceful since Pearl Harbor, thanks to the U. S. Think about the Washington Naval Treaty of the 1920s.

It crippled us against Japan and Germany. We didn't have a strong enough Navy to fight them. We had to struggle to catch up. But Japan and Germany, they just cheated on the treaty. It's very much like our climate treaties do today, but that's a topic for another episode. At the end of World War II, our navy was greater than all other navies combined.

What would Hitler have done with such a navy? What would Japan have done? What would Stalin have done? Well, we scrapped it. We scrapped it. We barely had enough ships to bring out of [00:29:00] mothballs when the Korean War started.

And so no one has ever had to devise a treaty in order to prevent our conquering them. It's always the other direction. Our attitude is so different from other countries. World War II was caused by World War I.

There were multiple causes of World War I. The Germans may have been the worst, but they were all bad. At the end of the war though, the English, the French, the Belgians, and the Dutch, they all demanded reparations from Germany. Billions of Reichmarks, well it wasn't Reichmarks then, billions of marks from Germany, resulting in hyperinflation and the Weimar Republic and giving rise to Adolf Hitler.

The Europeans, all of them, created World War II. But at the end of World War II, did the U. S. then create World War III? No, the U. S. Created the Marshall Plan. We sent billions of dollars to rebuild [00:30:00] Europe. We rebuilt Japan. And now, today, Germany and Japan are the least likely nations to start a war. Which is the opposite of the history, decades of history, prior to their defeat.

They all had, they both had multiple wars. Ironically, our allies, China and Russia, have started the most wars since World War II. But nevertheless, both so called world wars were European wars. There's never been a world war started in the Americas. And all the interventions that people talk about, what are they, what, Korea, Lebanon, Vietnam, Panama, Grenada?

If we were invaders, then where's our booty? And are we still there now? And what was every other country doing at the same time? Speaking of things like France and all the atrocities they committed right after the war in Algeria and in Indochina, leading to the [00:31:00] Vietnam war and the Dutch. The war is barely over and then they go to Indonesia and they commit atrocities there against their colonies there.

And we don't have any booty from any of these interventions. It's all a matter of how much it costs us.

But if you still want to call it an intervention, okay, well, If you think that, then just consider this number. More Chinese, from 15 to 20 million, died in World War II than in all the wars since then, everywhere on the planet. Or Russians. 15 to 20 million Chinese. Or Russians. Russians, the number's even higher.

27 million. More Russians died in World War II. Then have died in all the wars since then, including all of these so called American interventions. So if the U. S. really has invaded a hundred countries since World War II, then lucky, [00:32:00] lucky you.

Conclusion: Reflecting on Pearl Harbor and Global Peace

The Tenth Man: Pearl Harbor was a disaster for Americans. It was also a disaster for the Japanese who were foolish enough to pick a fight with America, and for the Germans who could have just done nothing, and yet they decided to declare war on us before we could declare war on them. But for the Allies, it was a great day, because it brought America into the war, and so we could once again pull their fat out of the fire.

And it was a great day for world peace, because from that day forward And, at least for the moment, the United States has been shouldering the burden for all of our parasite friends and allies. Maybe those allies should start showing a little bit of gratitude, or prepare to maintain peace in Europe and Asia on their own.

Thank you for listening.