Sunday’s editorial recalls how the Japanese attack in 1941 changed
the course of history, and contemplates the lessons it has for the present.
Monday is the anniversary of the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, which pulled the United
States into the wars already raging in Europe
and the Pacific. It was war that most Americans did not want. Japanese forces
also attacked on Dec. 7, 1941 throughout the Pacific region, including the
Philippine Islands, Guam, Wake Island, Midway
Island, Malaya and Hong
Kong.
“Isolationism and the America
Firsters vanished overnight,” writes Winston Groom in his new book “1942: The
Year That Tried Men's Souls.” Americans everywhere “went around in a kind of
daze, the conflagration enveloping the entire globe now reeling in their minds.
For nearly a year they had known the thing was there and had groped to make out
its form and nature and to comprehend how it came to be and have so much power.
. . . It was a true world war now, and America was in it to the hilt.”
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