Richard Cohen's opinion piece recently reprinted in the Arizona Republic makes the despicable claim that the United States and Franklin Roosevelt "slept" and ignored what was going on in the world in the years leading up to Pearl Harbor. Never mind that it's egregious to mention Republican presidential hopeful John Huntsman in a column about Hitler, it's a canard to claim America slept and did nothing until Pearl Harbor. Canard means despicable lie. Do you think the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor because they had nothing better to do? Or that Hitler declared war on the United States because he thought it wasn't sporting to just beat up on the Russians.
Events in the world, particularly in the Far East (completely omitted by Mr. Cohen), resulted in the Roosevelt administration starting a major expansion of the United States Navy prior to World War II. This began with the Trammel-Vinson Act of 1934, which authorized an addition of 95 ships and 1100 naval aircraft. In 1934, work began on the aircraft carriers Yorktown and Enterprise. Famously, the Yorktown and Enterpise would defeat the Japanese at Midway in the Pacific only six months after the disaster at Pearl Harbor. Hornet, the third American aircraft carrier at Midway, was ordered in 1939 and commissioned six weeks before Pearl Harbor was attacked. Only a few days after Hitler captured Paris, the Navy began work on building the first three Essex class super-aircraft carriers of that era.
World War II began in Asia in 1937 when Japan attacked China and began killing off millions of Chinese. When the US imposed economic sanctions, Japan responsed by attacking the US at Pearl Harbor. But by then the US was already secretly engaged in the U-Boat war in the Atlantic and providing ships, aircraft and guns to the British. US pilots in US-supplied aircraft secretly hunted down the German battleship Bismark in 1940 for the British Navy. By July of 1941, five months before Pearl Harbor, US troops occupied Iceland, the key base for protecting North Atlantic convoys. In the course of the war this American-protected convoy route not only saved the British, but also supplied the Soviet Union with the 375,00 trucks, 50,000 jeeps, 15,000 aircraft, 7,000 and 8,000 artillery guns. This equipment -- provided by Franklin Roosevelt and America -- saved the Soviet Union and enabled the Red Army to overwhelm the Nazi's in a lightning offensive in 1944 that swept out of Russia to the gates of Warsaw and Krakow.
There were 1,000,000 American casualties during World War II. Calling that sleep or a moral lapse is the most despicable anti-American lie I have ever read.
Never mind that Stalin was the real villian in this. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact 1939 gave Hitler the greenlight to invade Catholic Poland. As the Germans invaded from the west, the Communists invaded Poland from the east, a fact totally neglected by our media today, along with the hundreds of thousands of Poles who disappeared during the Soviet occupation. We remember Charles Lindbergh as the infamous America Firster, what the lefties don't like to remember was that in 1939 and 1940 America's lefties backed Stalin and were singing the same tune as Lindbergh.
