65 years ago today this nation was the target of an ignominious attack at Pearl Harbor.

The United States responded, giving rise to the greatest generation this nation has ever known. The enemy had a sick ideology and a propaganda machine so effective that Japanese women were throwing their children off of cliffs onto jagged rocks in the sea below rather than let them fall into the hands of the advancing Americans.

Our fathers and grandfathers crushed the enemy, insisting on unconditional surrender in order to stamp out all vestiges of the malevolent culture that wanted to destroy us and dominate the world.

They then aided the conquered people in rebuilding their nation, introducing democracy where there had never been such a thing. Who would have thought that democracy could take hold in a nation so entrenched in class stratification and the Bushido code, in a country with centuries of history of warlords and samurai, with a citizenry of peasants that literally thought of their emperor as a god?

The greatest generation not only thought so, they believed so. And democracy did take hold, and more. It flourished and gave rise to one of the great friendships of our times. America and Japan are partners on every level: politically, economically and, to a great extent, philosophically.

Blogging Tennessee state representative Stacey Campfield has a series of photos on that fateful day that changed the history of the world forever. Just start at the top and scroll start scrolling.

As you look at those photos, I pray that they remind you that men are capable of great evil, and that this has not changed.

Today we are faced with a sinister force that has at its core a malignancy just as fearful, just as hateful, just as grotesque, just as viscous, just as vile and just as dangerous as that which our nation faced 65 years ago.

There is great evil in the world still, and it threatens the lives of the children and the children’s children of the greatest generation.

I pray that in the end, we will have the courage and perseverance of those we remember today.

Professor Richard Brilliant of Columbia University, in the six hour series Rome: Power & Glory:

The aqueducts of Rome reached 60 and 70 miles into the hills to guarantee a continual flow of fresh water into the city. That flow of fresh water provided enough water, gallons per person per day, that was not equaled by the city of Rome until the 1950s.

Recently declassified documents reveal that Nixon was considering using nuclear bombs to bring an end to the Vietnam war in an operation code named “Duck Hook”:

But Nixon abandoned Duck Hook shortly after Oct. 2. Both his secretaries of Defense and State, Melvin Laird and William Rogers, opposed the plan. Nixon apparently also began to doubt whether he could sustain public support for the three- to six-month period the plan might require. He also concluded that his military threats against the North Vietnamese had no effect.

Threats are rarely useful. For instance, French threats of economic sanctions against Iran. Uh, OK, French threats of anything (except surrender — those are always taken seriously).

Indeed, the time and place to use nukes in Vietnam was in 1953 in a place called Dien Bien Phu. The French were trying for a decisive military victory out in the middle of nowhere. Instead, General Vo Nguyen Giap conducted a brilliant 56-day siege that ended with at least 2,200 dead Frenchmen (including many of the elite Foreign Legion) and a French surrender of 11,000 men (of which a little over 4,000 survived captivity).

If the French had accepted the two tactical nukes that Eisenhower offered, history would have turned out vastly different.

Just as an aside, fourteen years later General Giap tried to do the same thing to an American Marine base called Khe Sanh. 205 American soldiers were killed while ten to fifteen thousand Viet Min died before they gave up eleven weeks later and trickled back into the jungle. When the NVA shut down the airstrip, the French had resorted to high-altitude parachute drops resulting in a great many supplies, ammunition and even vital intelligence landing outside the base and falling into enemy hands. At Khe Sanh, the U.S. Army 109th Quartermaster Company used the Low Altitude Parachute Extraction System (LAPES) with great success. The seige for Khe Sanh was a great American military victory (achieved without dipping into the nuclear arsenal) that was turned into a major North Vietnamese propaganda win by our Fourth Estate.

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Fourth Estate Equals Fifth Column.

There’s a rather good article on the rise and fall of the Ferguson Rifle, a breach loading rifle that could be quickly reloaded while lying prone on the ground (which one would think is a good thing in an era of rifle volleys fired into walls of human flesh).

The author concludes that there were several factors that contributed to the Ferguson’s failure, but I found this one to be most interesting:

As early as 1781, a prominent Englishman, Joseph Galloway, accused [Sir William Howe, commander of British forces in North America] of “losing the war on purpose.” He charged that Howe, a member of Britain’s Whig Party, had been an American sympathizer for years. When Howe had stood for Parliament in Nottingham in 1775, he said he would never fight against the Americans. But when the King ordered him to Boston, Howe could not refuse.

For years Americans had wondered why every time Howe had the Continental army nearly beaten, he refused victory. Squandered opportunities included: Long Island, where he had to issue repeatedly his order to halt his troops, preventing them from storming Brooklyn Heights; White Plains; Chatterton’s Hill; Brandywine, where he could have followed up and destroyed Washington’s army; and Valley Forge, when the Americans were sick, nearly helpless, and low on rations and ammunition. After Long Island, American General Israel Putnam said, “General Howe is either our friend or no general.”

History is indeed fascinating.

[HT to non-blogging Advised by Wolves]

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