Truly, now more than ever, students cannot let their education end with college graduation, particularly when institutions of higher learning are increasingly sacrificing bodies of knowledge for reams of interpretation. For example, too few graduates get to learn about America’s uncanny knack for dismantling its defenses before being forced into world conflicts by enemy attacks and her remarkable resilience in overcoming same.
In an astounding bit of serendipity, the percentage of the federal budget that the federal government devotes to defense was similar before both the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941 and the attacks of September 11, 2001—17 percent. Coincidentally, this is the share of the budget that the Obama Administration wants to bring defense spending back down to.
“When the European war began in earnest on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland, the U.S. Army ranked seventeenth among armies of the world in size and combat power, just behind Romania,” Rick Atkinson, author of The Army at Dawn and The Day of Battle, said earlier this month.
Atkinson, who spoke at a conference organized by the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), is at work on the third volume of a trilogy he is writing on World War II. “At the time of Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, only one American division was on a full war footing,” Atkinson said at the FPRI event in Wheaton, Illinois. “Some American coastal defense guns had not been test-fired in 20 years, and the Army lacked enough antiaircraft guns to protect even a single American city.”
“The senior British military officer in Washington told London that ‘American forces are more unready for war than it is possible to imagine,’” Atkinson related. “In May 1940, the month that the German Blitzkrieg swept through the Low Countries and overran France, the U.S. Army owned a total of 464 tanks, mostly puny light tanks with the combat power of a coffee can.”
Despite America’s achievement in overcoming these seemingly insurmountable obstacles to victory, Atkinson, on leave from an editing job at The Washington Post, takes exception to any notion that America is exceptional. “The U.S. Army did not win World War II by itself,” he insists. “We can be proud of our role, proud of our Army; we must not be delusional, chauvinistic, or so besotted with American exceptionalism that we falsify history.”
“The war began 27 months before American entry into the war. It was fought on six continents, a global conflagration unlike any seen before or since.” Nonetheless, he goes on to lay out the sheer scope of the U. S. effort.
“Germany could not muster the wherewithal to cross the English Channel, which is only 21 miles wide, to invade Britain,” he observes. “The United States projected power across the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific and into
Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent.”
“Power-projection, adaptability, versatility, ingenuity, preponderance—these are salient characteristics of the U.S. Army in WWII.” On the home front:
• “The United States built 3.5 million private cars in 1941; for the rest of the war, we built 139;
• “Instead, in 1943 alone, we built 86,000 planes, 45,000 tanks, and 648,000 trucks;
• “We made in that one year 61 million pairs of wool socks;
• “Every day, another 71 million rounds of small-arms ammunition spilled from Army munitions plants.”
America won that war and averted a replay of the 9/11 massacres with what amounted to a catch-up defense. As for whatever, as the vice-president might put it, “loin-girding challenges” await this nation, well, as a popular World War II song went, We did it before and we can do it again.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
