IT'S PEARL HARBOR DAY

December 7, 1941. America was sleeping on that Sunday morning when Japanese planes attempted to sink the entire American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and came pretty close to doing just that, killing 2,402 U.S. servicemen in a devastating surprise attack. Not close enough, however, and three and a half years later Japan would sign an unconditional surrender on board the American battleship U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay. That ceremony formally ended the largest and most horrific war ever fought, punctuated at its end by two atomic bombs leveling two Japanese cities. 72 million people lost their lives in World War 2 and countess cities were destroyed, the work of centuries in ruins.

The United States Navy of 1941 was small and outmoded compared to the Japanese Imperial Fleet, with too few aircraft carriers and too many aging battleships and cruisers, ships that would prove obsolete during the long-range naval battles waged with aircraft launched from aircraft carriers that characterized the war in the Pacific. These battles marked the first time in naval history that fleets fought pitched battles without being within sight of one another. On December 7, 1941 Japan proved that ship-borne airpower was the deciding factor in modern naval warfare.

The only problem was that they attacked the greatest industrial nation on earth and for the next three years America's factories finished a warplane every hour and a new ship every week to send against our enemies. Pearl Harbor was Japan's first great victory and they followed it swiftly with stunning victories over American, British and French forces in the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, Indochina and all over the Pacific Rim, capturing those territories and taking the defending armies captive. Their dominance would last all of six months when when a rebuilt modern American Navy began defeating the Japanese Navy on a regular basis, starting at the battle of Midway. Our ships then delivered the Marines and the Army to one island after another to rout their stubborn but isolated ground forces until they were knocking on Japan's door in the summer of 1945 and preparing to invade their home islands. Two atomic bombs made that unnecessary and the war ended. A weary world rejoiced.

And so we remember Pearl Harbor Day not only to honor the valiant fighting men who perished in that attack, but also to mark the day that the world went mad. War was already raging in Europe and China, and the inclusion of America pretty much made war on a grand scale unanimous among the modern industrialized nations of the day. The only continent untouched was the uninhabited Antarctica. Even neutral South America had naval battles waged in their waters and suffered great shipping losses from U-Boat attacks trying to prevent vital shipments of rubber and other war materials from reaching America and our allies. Russia lost 23 million people in the war, Germany another 7.3 million. Japan lost around 2.7 million souls while America buried almost 420,000 soldiers, about the population of the city of Cleveland, Ohio.

Why? A thousand reasons, none of them good, but most of them necessary to stop the fascist and imperial conquerors threatening the world back then. The Holocaust was typical of the new world order the aggressors were planning to impose. Japan was equally murderous to the peoples they conquered, also considering them subhuman and their lives of no consequence. Was the war avoidable? We'll never know. By the time Pearl Harbor was attacked it seemed the only two choices were to resist the madness at great cost or to submit to it at even greater cost.

Once committed to that task, the United States and the allied nations went about it swiftly and brutally. America had 12 million men under arms and a nation dedicated to the war effort. Of the 72 million dead, 61 million were from the victorious allied nations, well over half of the dead being civilians, either methodically murdered, randomly bombed in cities and factories, caught in the crossfire or starved and sickened by hellish circumstances. While fascism and imperialism were thoroughly defeated, the toll was mind-numbing and the political alignment afterwards saw Europe divided between communism and democracy in a cold war that would terrify the world for over 40 years. The invention and proliferation of nuclear weapons made the specter of another, even more horrific world war seem like a very real possibility.

The Second World War ended 63 years ago. The ruined cities have long since been rebuilt and Germany and Japan are once more peaceful nations, solid international citizens dealing peaceably with the world. The Cold War between the United States and The Soviet Union ended in 1990 when the Soviet Union did. Since then, the United States has been the sole global superpower, a mixed blessing at best in a dangerous and still divided world. We are at war yet again, this time against shadowy international guerilla forces we helped create during the Cold War, Islamic Extremists armed and trained by the United States to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan thirty years ago. They learned to kill Westerners and liked it, and now train others to fight and commit terrorist acts, teaching them to blame others for the failure, illiteracy and squalor of their native societies. Events led our very stupid president George W. Bush to actually attack a neutral nation for the first time in this country's history in a belated and mistaken response to our new Pearl Harbor, the horrible terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001.

America remains bogged down in Iraq for longer than it took to win World War 2 and the perpetrators who so devastatingly attacked America 7 years ago are still at large. A new president, Barack Obama is preparing to lead America starting in January of 2009 and he faces a huge array of very serious problems at home and abroad, and the task of reversing the erratic and amateurish policies of the worst president America has ever had. Little heed is given Pearl Harbor Day in recent years as the veterans of that conflict that shaped today's world grow old and die. But we should always remember their sacrifice, their bravery and their unselfishness. And we need to remind ourselves to never again allow world events to deteriorate to the point where madness takes over and widespread warfare and destruction define a decade of human history. Let us hear the voices of those 72 million dead souls, begging the world to never again descend to the depths of madness and let their deaths mean nothing, their profound suffering just another page in another dusty history book. Remember them, and learn.