Pearl Harbor attack offers haunting lessons for today

“Pacific Ablaze” read Australian papers on December 8, 1941, as the world learned about the monumental events that unfolded only hours before.

Japan had simultaneously declared war against the United States and the United Kingdom, then immediately launched stunning attacks spanning 6,400 kilometers – and the international date line – from Singapore to Hong Kong, Malaya, Bangkok, Guam, and the Philippines.

The most iconic attack was on Pearl Harbor. Within the US territory of Hawaii, Japanese forces decimated the immense naval base, drawing the US into World War II that had begun in 1939.

The attack opened the war’s Pacific theater, spanning the entire ocean. It brought untold devastation, loss and change to the Pacific’s remotest islands and its densest population centers.

Eighty years on, the prodigious history triggered on the “day which will live in infamy” is being revived in increasingly ominous ways.

Japan’s opening attacks triggered a cascading crisis of events. After the December 7 and 8 attacks, Australians were told that halting Japan’s southward expansion “all depends on Singapore”.

Singapore fell in a matter of days, on February 15, 1942. Prime Minister John Curtin described this event as “Australia’s Dunkirk,” leaving it wide open to invasion. New Guinea was then attacked on February 16.

Darwin bombed

Three days later, the war came to Australia’s mainland. Darwin was bombed for the first time on February 19, killing more than 230 people and destroying infrastructure.

Bombing raids across northern Australia followed, as did acute fears of Japanese submarine attacks along the industrial and heavily populated east coast. These fears were realized with attacks in Sydney Harbour in May and Newcastle in June 1942.

The arrival of American troops reversed Australia’s desperate situation. The first of nearly 1 million who rotated through Australia – then with a population of 7 million – began arriving in December 1941.

In the wake of the Pacific-wide attacks, Curtin recognized Australia’s grave defense vulnerabilities premised on deeply flawed British imperial plans. He declared that “Australia looks to America” as its only hope against invasion.

The arrival of American troops ensured Australian soil would not be the battleground for defeating Japan.

Instead, Pacific islands from the Alaska Territory’s Aleutian Islands, Kiribati, the Solomon Islands, Australia’s colonies of Papua and New Guinea to Japan’s former mandated territories colonies, like the Northern Marianas, saw four years of slaughter.

The blood-letting finally ended with the war’s greatest mass-casualty events of all, the US atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August 1945.

Throughout the war, Australia – first Melbourne and then Brisbane – served as America’s headquarters for prosecuting the war against Japan.

The countless bonds forged were only solidified after the conflict’s end with the rapid escalation of the Cold War and the outbreak of proxy wars in the Pacific region, involving the US and its allies against Communist Russia and China. These were most notably in Korea (1950-1953) and then Vietnam (1965-1975).

Throughout the postwar era, the 1951 ANZUS Treaty served as the basis for the US and Australian relationship. During these decades, the Pacific islands faded into the geopolitical background, though they were littered with the war’s still deadly refuse.

But China’s growing influence from the mid-2000s slowly reignited Australian and US attention to the Pacific Islands

In 2021 we have seen an intense recalibration of the US-Australia relationship.

Asian power

The surprise September 2021 announcement of the AUKUS agreement between the US, Australia and the UK has led to an avalanche of debate about northern attacks on Australia from an Asian power – this time China – submarines and the Pacific’s nuclear legacies.

Then, on November 29, 2021, the US Defence Department announced in its global posture review that it will concentrate military activities and infrastructure in Australia and select Pacific Islands.

There’s no question the US and the UK are returning to the Pacific at levels not seen since World War II. The AUKUS agreement, initiated by the Morrison government, encapsulates the escalating tensions due to China’s troubling acts.

These include its rhetorical and trade war with Australia, aggressions towards Taiwan, military expansion in the South China Sea, and its deepening influence in the Pacific islands as a suspected veiled means to project its military power.

Australia’s prime minister and, most recently, defence minister have conjured up the Pacific War, saying “we live in the echoes of the 1930s,” citing “mistakes” that led to the war.

China has lashed back, criticizing the Australian government for super-charging fears that history is repeating at a terrifying scale and pace.

The 80th anniversary of the Pearl Harbour attack is an opportune moment to take stock and think about some lessons of history. Here are some to consider.

Australia, the US and the UK were all woefully unprepared for Japan’s belligerence from late 1941. Securing Australia’s defenses now is sensible, if not overdue.

But addressing this security need does not have to be accompanied by the beating of war drums or the fracturing of other vital alliances, as with the Morrison government’s diplomatic “own goal” with France over the submarine deal scuttled by the AUKUS agreement.

With AUKUS, the Biden administration got a taste of Australia taking the diplomatic lead – an enraged France withdrew its US ambassador for the first time in history. One of the vital mistakes that led to war was the failure of diplomacy.

Unimaginable suffering

The Pacific war was ruinous. It caused unimaginable suffering to Japan’s populace both in the defeated country and living around the Pacific region. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Japanese people were “rounded-up” into internment camps and their personal assets stripped.

In the case of Hawaii, where one-quarter of the population in 1941 was of Japanese descent, they lived under harsh military law. Pacific Islanders, whose islands were war fronts, also suffered immeasurably from the conflict.

Australian and American soldiers and their families also sustained terrible losses. For many who survived the war, its horrors never ceased.

For China, the conflict began years before 1941, in the 1930s, with Japanese aggression and a crushing invasion epitomized by searing events, such as the 1937 Rape of Nanking.

The brutality and devastation sparked by the Pearl Harbor attacks should not fade from the minds of politicians from all sides. Eighty years on, there remain powerful lessons to be learned.

Patricia A. O’Brien is a visiting fellow in the department of Pacific affairs at the Australian National University and the adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. She is also an adjunct professor of the Asian studies program at Georgetown University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of China Factor.