Some interesting historical tidbits that many aren't aware of...
FDR froze Japanese assets in the U.S. to stop them from being able to purchase U.S. petroleum to continue their rampage throughout Asia. The Japanese took this as a declaration of War long before the attack on Pearl, his carefully crafted speech where the first paragraph was designed to make sure America was seen as the victim of aggression, and the resulting declaration by Congress an hour later. We were already at War with Japan, after essentially stealing huge amounts of money from them, but the average Joe on the street didn't realize it.
The damage to the Pacific fleet and the speed with which Japan took every island except the Bataan peninsula in the Philippines and Hawaii, had the War department utterly terrified. Even during the infamous speech, no specifics on damage or casualties were really given, and all the American people were told for many years was the body count of just over 2000. The War department, probably rightly so, classified the damage assessment information about Pearl as being far too dangerous to publish. If published, the Japanese may have pushed even harder in the Pacific.
And the leadership had already decided the war in the Pacific had to wait on the war in Europe. We weren't prepared at all to even fight one war, let alone two. The Army still thought their cavalry horses from WWI were going to be useful. We at least showed up to the North Africa expedition with tanks instead of horses, but most of them were death traps when put up against the few German Tigers that made it to Tunisia.
The stories of Tiger tankers standing *outside* their tanks and firing them with ropes! taking out whole divisions of our early tanks without them even getting inside the tank! from ranges greater than our tanks could effectively fire, are horrifying if you think about them from the point of view of a farm kid sent to fight in a U.S. tank. Stories of infantry moving forward on open ground as 88mm shells flew by at chest height so close you could feel the concussion in the air of their passing you on the way to the tanks behind you (and the occasional individual soldier vaporizing in a cloud of blood and body parts if they just happened to be directly in the path of one of those shells) are incredible.
The follow on stories of "shell shock", or "war weariness" that today we know better as PTSD, where American soldiers would try to dig foxholes in their beds in hospitals, screaming that Jerry was coming, aren't really too surprising knowing the sad state of our gear early on.
Back in the Pacific, it's still my opinion that MacArthur leaving Corregador by PT boat with his family was one of the most cowardly things I've ever seen of a General. Granted, he and Ike knew no reinforcements were forthcoming for the Americans and Filipinos holding the Bataan peninsula and Ike felt he couldn't lose his most well-known General, but it was a coward's move nevertheless. Wiring from Australia that he "would be back" was just PR spin. He would, of course, but the men he left behind suffered through the Bataan Death March as a direct result of abandoning the Pacific theatre.
There was probably no way logistically to rescue the garrison on the Phillippines, but MacArthur sitting on his hands with 9 hours of warning before Pearl and not protecting his aircraft, certainly didn't help things. No one wanted to give away that we were eavesdropping on Japanese radio traffic.
Most of the history we hear and see today is of the latter half of the War. When we were finally up to speed and winning. We had our asses handed to us big time in the Pacific and Tunisia first. You don't hear nearly as much about that. If Rommel hadn't just completely shut down and retreated for no discernible reason, he'd have pushed Allied forces all the way back to Algiers.
But he was war weary also, and ill, having been waging war for far longer than we had at that point, and did similarly to his troops as MacArthur did, "accepting" the German high command's offer of a trip home to recuperate. He left, and knew the a German high command was wrong to try to hold as much ground as they were attempting to hold in North Africa, but was too tired or outranked to stop it.
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