The Battle of
Midway was fought 72 years ago, from June 4, 1942 to June 7, 1942. Air strikes
from U.S. aircraft carriers maimed beyond repair the four Japanese aircraft
carriers. The Japanese fleet, and Japan, never recovered.
Less than six
months earlier, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese attack swept across the
Pacific. Franklin Roosevelt, in his "Day of Infamy" speech, told the
damage:
"Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941 - a date which will live in
infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by
naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.... The attack yesterday on the
Hawaiian islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military
forces. Very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships
have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and
Honolulu. Yesterday, the Japanese government also launched an attack against
Malaya. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night, Japanese
forces attacked Guam. Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Philippine
Islands. Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island. This morning, the
Japanese attacked Midway Island. Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise
offensive extending throughout the Pacific area."
Less than six months later, over a course of a few minutes, three of the four
Japanese aircraft carriers were sinking. A fourth Japanese carrier was
irreparably injured soon after. All four gargled then sank to the ocean floor.
The Battle of Midway is an important moment in history. What happened, of
course, stands on its own. It is also good to remind ourselves the course of
history can change fast. Some historians, by no means all, contend the Japanese
lost the war within those five or six minutes when aircraft from the USS
Enterprise, USS Yorktown, and USS Hornet commenced their fatal on the Akagi,
Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu.
The contention, which is supported by evidence, describes the impossibility of
the Japanese industrial capacity to compete with American steel, tank,
aircraft, and ship construction. (Within five miles of where I grew up,
between 1942 and 1945, one shipyard built 92 battleships, aircraft carriers,
heavy cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers. Five miles to the south,
between 1942 and 1945, another shipyard built over 250 naval ships.)
The argument of a decisive Japanese loss is well received by minds trained in
the twentieth century. But, it does not weigh human potentiality. It is true
the Japanese fleet never again held supremacy, if supremacy, it was: the Battle
of Midway showed that military supremacy over the oceans now was in the air,
not on ships. Today, maybe, we are to be menaced by the Age of Drones, which
would be a short hop from the Death of the Age of Economists.
It is true
Japanese industry did not measure up to American production. But to stop here
is to abide by the economic, deterministic, GDP-worshipping, data junkyard that
ignores history. It died, and Marxism died, at the Battle of the Marne, when
not one worker of the world crossed lines to fight alongside his German or
British contemporary. In an important book, The End of Economic Man: The
Origins of Totalitarianism, written in 1933 and published in 1939, Peter
Drucker wrote the lowest floor sweeper at Rolls-Royce joined with the owners to
fight the against the workers of the Kaiser. Economic man was finished; always
a fantasy, it ignored the rise of Nationalism as the most potent nineteenth-century
evolution.
The Battle of
Midway teaches the wish must be met by the will. The speed at which the U.S.
fleet was resurrected at Pearl Harbor is still astonishing to contemplate.
Another example was the enormous aircraft production in Germany in 1944 and
1945. Figures are not at hand, but German cities were ashen cemeteries at the
same time German workers (not many young, or even middle-aged, men) built
aircraft at such at a tremendous pace. This production was a demonstration of
will. Perhaps - only perhaps - the wish was not accompanied by the will in
Japanese production, starting in 1942.
The senior
Japanese naval leaders misjudged the American naval forces approaching off
Midway Atoll. The Japanese leaders' calculations were by no means
unsophisticated. They were wrong. We can say with a high degree of assurance no
Japanese naval leader, in preparation for battle, stated he was "100%
sure" of the outcome. We can say, with a slightly lower degree of assurance,
if a Japanese naval leader had made such a claim, he would have been launched
as the first Kamikaze missionary upon the USS Yorktown.
Other than
the Emperor and a few senior military leaders, the Japanese people believed
they had won a great military victory at Midway. What happened when the
Japanese people found out otherwise, of Midway and much else? They had been
lied to, used, violated, lost their homes, marriages, and careers, when they
had been drawn into a nationalistic fervor, believing their leaders and they
were of a piece?
Today, across
the globe, the wish our so-called leaders are not lying to us, will be
100% correct over events of which they are "100% sure," will be
regarded, in time, as a catastrophic miscalculation by the human race. In the
instant of recognition: what price gold?
As a
footnote, the death of Winston Churchill's daughter, Lady Soames (Mary
Churchill), on May 31, 2014, who was a friend, can at least be remembered here
with Churchill's instruction, in 1939, that every graduate of the British
Officers' Candidate School be given a copy of Peter Drucker's book,
The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism (packaged
with a copy of Alice in Wonderland). Drucker could not find a
publisher until that year, even though he wrote it when Herr Hitler took charge
in 1933. In Drucker's 1969 words, "[i]t was far too 'extreme' in its
conclusions: that Hitler's anti-Semitism would be propelled by its inner logic
towards the 'ultimate solution' of killing all the Jews; that the huge armies
of Western Europe would not offer effective resistance to the Germans; or that
Stalin would end up signing a pact with Hitler."
Drucker wrote
in a 1994 "Introduction" that, even in the 1970s, "the book was
pointedly ignored by the scholarly community." It remains one of Drucker's
least-known books. Academics would still ignore the book today, if they knew
about it. Some may think it remarkable, some may know it is always the case, a
book that could so penetrate the mind of 1933, explaining the process by which
minds evolved over the next few years, would have no audience with academia,
regressed, as it has, to a state of infantilism, in 2014.
In one of
Winston Churchill's best-remembered speeches, he stated: "If we fail, then
the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known
and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister,
and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science." That
speech was delivered in 1940, a year after Churchill ordered every British
officer's kit include Drucker's book, no doubt intending they understood what
they were defending and against what they were fighting. (No, it wasn't the
British Empire.)
Churchill's
foresight of a "new Dark Age," made "more
sinister," and "more protracted," by the "lights of
perverted science" can be seen in letters he wrote in the 1890s.
Peering ahead at such an age may be why he understood so early the danger of
Hitler to Europe, and to the human race. He might not be surprised at the
anti-human Age of Drones or by the dreary Age of Economists.
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