Operation AXIOM

Seventy-three years ago to the day, 7 December 1941, "a date which will live in infamy," the Empire of Japan launched a sneak attack against Pearl Harbor, thus accomplishing what British desperation & German provocation could not, the entrance of the United States of America into the Second World War. The aerial & naval attack on Pearl Harbor was not intended to be a true sneak attack, but the timing with which Japan intended to declare war meant that Pearl Harbor was meant to be a legitimate act of war only in the most technical sense. This was of a piece with Japan's history over the preceding half-century, from the Sino-Japanese War to the Russo-Japanese War to the First World War. The Japanese miscalculated, misjudging the American character, & calling down destruction upon themselves & their land. By the end of the war the Imperial Japanese Navy would lie broken & rusting at the bottom on the ocean, the Imperial Japanese Army would lie buried in shallow graves on forsaken specks of islands throughout the Pacific, & the cities of Japan would be reduced to ash, burnt by fire chemical or, for the first time in the course of human event, nuclear. The generosity of the Americans is without equal or precedent; the wrath of the Americans is short-lived but peerless in its devastation. The Japanese Empire slit its own throat by bombing & torpedoing the American fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor, seventy-three years ago today.