At Dawn They Slept. . .

(At Dawn They Slept. . .)

Today is the 81st Anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The most thorough account of that event has been Gordon Prange's superlative At Dawn We Slept, The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor. In this lengthy volume. Prange was able to merge American failures and indeed, Japanese successes, into a seamless whole, blending diplomatic history, military history, political history, and a fair dose of cryptography into a narrative that described the development of Japan's plan to send a carrier strike force to attack the American Pacific Fleet riding anchor at Oahu. There had been signs that such an eventually was possible, but there had been a failure of imagination at all levels of American policy making, from FDR to the Navy and Army commanders in Hawaii.

And there had been bureaucratic infighting. Between the War Department and Navy Departments. Turf wars as to who would control the dissemination of intelligence, War or Navy ? Each had its own agenda and each had officers that had his own program. Was it to be the Office of Naval Intelligence or the War Plans Division ? With such discordance across the spectrum, it was easy to lose sight of Japanese intentions. On the morning of December 7th. 1941, when "at dawn we slept," the Japanese attacked in two waves, 185 airplanes of all combat types and some 170 in the second. By the end, Pearl Harbor had been decimated. The Fleet Battle Line was destroyed, the various airfields lay in ruins, most of available fighters caught on the ground.

One has to say that, after the last night's victory of Rafael Warnock over Hershal Walker, the Republican Party is in as bad a shape as those Pacific Fleet battleships that were either sunk or otherwise damaged. It has also been a question of leadership and it has been a turf war. Instead of ONI versus War Plans. it was Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. The latter now has to preside over only 49 Republicans as opposed to 51 for the Democrats.

In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, there had been several investigations, Congressional and otherwise. Who will be examining GOP fortunes this year ? Some 2403 service members died on December 7th, over a thousand in the Arizona alone. The casualty list for these last Mid-Terms, however, must include the so-called establishment Republicans of which Senator McConnell is all but Chairman. Like those who collectively did not prevent the attack on Pearl Harbor, similarly, there have been those Republicans who are content with mediocrity and believe that 49 in the Senate is acceptable. There was no effort to bank votes like Democrats do. There was no Republican encouragement to vote early, believing that same day balloting could still carry the day. Hershal Walker would appear to be sufficient evidence to the contrary.