I’ve always thought June 4 should be a national holiday. That’s the date of the Battle of Midway, quite probably the single most significant naval victory in American history.
It avenged Pearl Harbor and irreversibly turned the tide against the Japanese, who until that date had never known a naval defeat. From June 4, 1942, Japan was on the defensive, although there was much hard fighting ahead.
It was a costly victory in terms of naval aviators killed in the attacks. We also lost a destroyer and the carrier Yorktown, but the sinking of four Japanese carriers and the loss of their planes, pilots and some 2,200 officers and men forced the Japanese to rethink their strategy. Thanks to our intrepid Navy pilots, the gloat over Pearl Harbor was cut short.
Many of you have probably read it, but if you haven’t, “The Two-Ocean War,” by Samuel Eliot Morison is an excellent short history of the Navy during World War II. It’s still available in paperback and is published by Little, Brown and Co. The value of reading good military histories is that they remind us of the terrible price that is paid by individual men and women even for victory. Another value is to remind us of the necessity of diplomacy to avoid war and a strong defense force to fight the war diplomacy fails to avoid.
The failure of diplomacy in the 1920s and 1930s brought on the war that, during the first eight years of my life, killed 55 million people. If I sometimes sound calloused, it is because as a child I became used to deaths in large numbers. Acts of terrorism today pale in comparison with deaths in battles and routine bombing raids in World War II. Iwo Jima, a small island indeed, cost around 7,000 American and 20,000 Japanese lives. More than 16,000 Americans were wounded. The island was two and half miles wide and about four and a half miles long. Talk about blood-soaked ground.
All of this is a prelude to say that the Bush administration appears determined to pursue reckless military objectives in Iraq and equally reckless diplomacy in regard to North Korea. At the same time, little thought seems to have been given to the strategic problems we face and the kinds of forces we need to handle them. The very idea of refusing to talk to North Korea is crazy. We should talk with them, with Iraq, with Iran and with anybody else. Talk is cheap. War is terribly expensive.
For our present circumstances, we need a powerful navy and marine corps with their respective air arms. These alone could guard our legitimate national interests. Most of the army could be put on a reserve status. It is inconceivable that any sane American president would commit us to land war in either Asia or Europe. NATO should be disbanded. It has no purpose, and American forces should be brought home. They should not be errand boys for the United Nations, they should not serve as peacekeepers anywhere, they should not train foreign military forces, and they damned sure should not be used to invade Third World countries anywhere.
Our American service people take an oath to defend the United States, not to serve as legionnaires on the outposts of a global corporate empire. Whatever oil or minerals we need we can buy from whoever is sitting on them, and other than that we have no legitimate interest in what kind of government they have.
Our most immediate problem is political leaders who seem to have read little and think even less, not to mention a bulky intelligence community that is so uncoordinated it probably represents more of a risk than a safeguard. World War II and the Cold War were wars enough. It is now time to pursue peace with strength. (King Features Syndicate)
