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Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Monday that he would visit Pearl Harbor, becoming the first sitting Japanese leader to go to the site of Japan’s attack 75 years ago

By visiting Pearl Harbor, Mr. Abe will in effect be reciprocating a historic trip Mr. Obama made in May to Hiroshima

“We must never repeat the horror of war,” Mr. Abe said on Monday. “I want to express that determination as we look to the future, and at the same time send a message about the value of U.S.-Japanese reconciliation.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story

Ever since people began to speculate about “World War III,” its very name has implied its own inevitability. We talk about it not only as something that might happen, but something that will. And it’s been on our minds for a very long time.

The phrase seems to have emerged during the early 1940s, not long after people began to think of the “Great War” of 1914 as World War I—a precursor to World War II. Time magazine mused about a third war as early as November 1941, one month before Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into WWII. More consequentially, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill started planning for a World War III while he was still fighting the second war. And he kept on worrying about it, too. “After he’s out office, during the summer of 1945 through 1946, he continually believes that the Soviet Union are going to start another war,” says Jonathan Walker, a military history writer and author of Operation Unthinkable: The Third World War.

The introduction of the atomic bomb in the 1940s and the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s gave the phrase “World War III” a new, specific meaning: nuclear annihilation. And as the U.S. and the Soviet union became locked in a Cold War, it seemed that nuclear war could break out at any moment. Writers had already been stoking people’s fears about nuclear energy long before the U.S. harnessed it into bombs, says Spencer R. Weart, a science historian and author of The Rise of Nuclear Fear. When scientists first discovered radioactivity and nuclear energy at the turn of the century, it evoked both awe and terror. One of them, Frederick Soddy, thought “it might even be possible to set off an explosion that would destroy the entire world,” Weart says.

Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes was livid. On February 19, 1942, 74 days after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, his boss, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the internment of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, 62% of whom were American born.

To drive his dissent home, Ickes soon had four Japanese-American men and three women transferred from a relocation camp in Arizona to his home in Olney, Maryland.

Donald Trump has defended his call to stop all Muslims from entering America, approvingly invoking FDR's mistaken action of 1942 as his benchmark. FDR, in my opinion, was the greatest president in U.S. history. But EO 9066 was his biggest mistake.

Sixteen-year-old Helmuth Hübener couldn’t believe his ears. As he crouched in a closet in Hamburg, secretly listening to his brother’s forbidden short-wave radio, the voice of the BBC announcer painted a picture of Nazi Germany that was dramatically different from the one he had been told to believe.

Germans like Hübener, they spoke of impending victory and praised the greatness of their country. But the Germany the BBC described—and the progress of the war its reporters tracked—sounded like it was on the brink of disaster

übener’s short life was shaped by the rise of fascism in Germany. The Nazis changed nearly every facet of everyday life for Germans, and the boy was no exception. A devoted Boy Scout, he was forced to become part of the Hitler Youth, the youth arm of the Nazi Party, when the Nazis banned the organization in 1935.

the British, during their late Victorian heyday, believed theirs was the exceptional Land of Hope and Glory, a vanguard of progress and model for all nations.[3] Can it be—O scary thought—that the same faith in Special Providence that inspires energy, ingenuity, resilience, and civic virtue in a nation, may also tempt a people into complacency, arrogance, self-indulgence, and civic vice?

what Americans believe about their past is always a powerful influence on their present behavior and future prospects. No wonder we have “culture wars” in which the representation of history is a principal stake.

my study of European international relations naturally inclined me to think about foreign policy in terms of Realpolitik, balance of power, geography, contingency, tragedy, irony, folly, unintended consequences, and systemic interaction—all of which are foreign if not repugnant to Americans.

Her work — drafting language that gave women a set of legal rights pertaining to marriage, divorce, property and inheritance that they had long been without in Japan’s feudal society — had an effect on their status that endures to this day. “It set a basis for a better, a more equal society,” Carol Gluck, a professor of Japanese history at Columbia University, said Monday in a telephone interview. “By just writing those things into the Constitution — our Constitution doesn’t have any of those things — Beate Gordon intervened at a critical moment. And what kind of 22-year-old gets to write a constitution?”

Beate was educated at a German school in Tokyo and, from the mid-1930s on, after the school became far too Nazified for her parents’ liking, at the American School in Japan. In 1939, shortly before her 16th birthday, she left for Mills College in Oakland, Calif. Her parents remained in Japan. In December 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, it became impossible to contact Japan. Beate had no word from her parents, and no money. She put her foreign language prowess to work: by this time, she was fluent in English, Japanese, German, French, Spanish and Russian.

For decades, Ms. Gordon said nothing about her role in postwar Japan, at first because the work was secret and later because she did not want her youth — and the fact that she was an American — to become ammunition for the Japanese conservatives who have long clamored for constitutional revision.

You write that Hitler's war aims were impossible—how so? The Germans were trying to win a straightforward conventional war and, at the same time, trying to fight an ideological war: a specifically Nazi war as opposed to a German war. I believe that a true German nationalist—Otto von Bismarck, say, or Helmuth von Moltke—could have won the Second World War, because he wouldn't have made the kind of demands of the German military that Hitler did, which was to win a two-front conventional war while at the same time imposing the policies of the "Aryan master race." Those aims were directly in opposition.

Could the Nazis have won, had they done something differently? Absolutely. If they had not invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and if they had instead thrown at the Allies even a fraction of the 3 million men they eventually unleashed against Russia, they would have chased us out of the Middle East and cut off access to 80 percent of the Allies' oil. We simply would not have been able to continue the struggle.

Was Hitler solely responsible for Germany's military blunders? No, there were plenty of people to blame. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring is a perfect example: He promised Hitler that no Allied bombs would fall on Germany; he promised to destroy the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk solely through airpower; he promised to completely supply the German forces at Stalingrad by air. Yet he could not deliver on any of these promises.

As I and other scholars have tried to show, Hirohito, from the start of his rule in 1926, was a dynamic, activist and conflicted monarch who operated within a complex system of irresponsibility inherited from his grandfather, the Meiji emperor, who oversaw the start of Japan’s epochal modernization.

Hirohito (known in Japan as Showa, the name of his reign) represented an ideology and an institution — a system constructed to allow the emperor to interject his will into the decision-making process, before prime ministers brought cabinet decisions to him for his approval. Because he operated behind the scenes, the system allowed his advisers to later insist that he had acted only in accordance with their advice.

In fact, Hirohito was never a puppet. He failed to prevent his army from invading Manchuria in 1931, which caused Japan to withdraw from the League of Nations, but he sanctioned the full-scale invasion of China in 1937, which moved Japan into a state of total war. He exercised close control over the use of chemical weapons in China and sanctioned the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Even after the war, when a new, American-modeled Constitution deprived him of sovereignty, he continued to meddle in politics.

The United States receives the most credit for defeating Adolf Hitler's Germany during World War Two, according to a YouGov poll

While the USSR trailed significantly in many of the countries sampled, the Soviets suffered the greatest losses of any of the Allies.

According to a new poll, however, most other countries look to the United States as the country that did the most to vanquish Adolf Hitler

President Obama addressed the nation Sunday night from the Oval Office, a rare use of the sacred symbols of the presidency to reassure Americans about their security while steeling them for a long and complex struggle against the Islamic State.

Donald Trump answered Obama’s call for tolerance by declaring that no Muslims should be permitted to enter the United States:

“Repackaged half measures . . . Tone deaf . . . sales pitch for the status quo . . . President Obama is riding the bench at T-ball today.

At 25, Lundberg was no stranger to America First, protective tariffs and nationalism. No American of his age or older could be. These themes had been among the most prominent topics for public debate throughout his short life. And each had contributed, in one way or another, to the chain of events that took Lundberg to war. The isolationism that fueled the original America First movement died with the first bomb at Pearl Harbor.

The danger and folly of these policies were written in an ocean of blood — Lundberg’s and all the others’. So when the wasteful war finally ended, the United States led the world away from those policies and built institutions to prevent new eruptions.

No sniveling Eastern elitist erected this framework. It was a bipartisan project guided by a Missouri farm boy, Harry S. Truman. A chastened former isolationist, Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, delivered Republican support to the Democratic president. “Politics,” the senator declared refreshingly, “stops at the water’s edge.”

visitors from anywhere in the United States can discover what their hometown newspapers were saying during the rise of Hitler. The answer is: a lot. Discrimination against, and then persecution of, Germany’s Jews was widely covered. Kristallnacht, the officially sanctioned pogrom of November 9–10, 1938, received particular attention, and was roundly condemned across the country. The sympathy with the Jews of Germany and later Europe was impressive, and is documented by contemporary Gallup polls.

But were Americans willing to take in refugees, even children? The answer is no: By a three-to-one margin, including on the eve of the war and indeed after it, Americans did not want such immigrants.

Grimmer yet: Did America admit at least those refugees provided for in the skimpy quotas allowed under law in the years leading up to 1941 and American entry? The answer again is no: not by a large margin. In 1936, for example, barely a quarter of the visas that could have been issued to refugees from Germany—most of them Jews—were in fact issued.

Nearly three-quarters of respondents said they were very or somewhat worried about themselves or a family member catching the virus, up from about half in March. And 40% said they personally knew someone who had been infected.

A total of 76% of respondents ranked the economy as fair or poor, compared with about half in March. Only 22% in the new survey described the economy as in good shape.

Meanwhile, more than three-quarters said the outbreak had changed their lives in major ways, including not being able to see family or friends and feeling anxious about grocery shopping. In March, one-quarter said there had been major changes to their lives.

There were scattered warnings before Pearl Harbor and 9/11 of what was to come. But nothing like this. My Post colleagues report that throughout January and February, the U.S. intelligence community was warning Trump that the pandemic was going to hit America. “The system was blinking red,” one official said.

ecause of Trump’s negligence, the United States lost two months of response time — precious days that should have been used to test the population, produce more N95 masks and ventilators, and build new hospital beds

I weep in anger and frustration imagining what might have been if Hillary Clinton — a sane, sensible adult — had won. We couldn’t have avoided the coronavirus, but we could have ameliorated its effects. We could be South Korea (102 deaths) rather than Italy (4,825 deaths and counting).

don’t take responsibility at all,” said President Donald Trump

Those words will probably end up as the epitaph of his presidency

Trump now fancies himself a “wartime president.” How is his war going?

In his vicious and ad hominem way, Carlson is doing something extraordinary: He’s challenging the Republican Party’s hawkish orthodoxy in ways anti-war progressives have been begging cable hosts to do for years. For more than a decade, liberals have rightly grumbled that hawks can go on television espousing new wars without being held to account for the last ones. Not on Carlson’s show.

Carlson responded that Boot had been so “consistently wrong in the most flagrant and flamboyant way for over a decade” in his support for wars in the Middle East that “maybe you should choose another profession, selling insurance, house painting, something you’re good at.”

On Iran, Carlson made an argument that was considered too dovish for even mainstream Democrats to raise during the debate over the nuclear deal: He questioned whether Tehran actually endangers the United States

he war in Europe was not just won with Soviet blood. When World War II started, America was isolationist and the Soviet Union collaborationist.

Once the United States entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Axis cause was largely doomed. America mobilized 12 million soldiers — about the same number as did the Soviet Union, despite having a population of about 40 million fewer citizens.

Of the major powers, only America’s homeland was not systematically bombed. It was never invaded. While its 400,000 fatalities were a terrible cost of victory, the United States lost the smallest percentage of its population of any major power.

the oft-repeated notion that it took World War II to end the economic nightmare of the ’30s: If a global war was needed to return the economy to full employment then, what is going to save us today?

While the war helped the recovery from the Depression, the economy was improving long before military spending increased. More fundamentally, the wrenching wartime experience provides a message of hope for our troubled economy today: we have the tools to deal with our problems, if only policy makers will use them.

Starting in the mid-1930s, Hitler’s aggression caused capital flight from Europe. People wanted to invest somewhere safer — particularly in the United States. Under the gold standard of that time, the flight to safety caused large gold flows to America. The Treasury Department under President Franklin D. Roosevelt used that inflow to increase the money supply.

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. It numbered 190,000 soldiers. (It would grow to 8.3 million in 1945, a 44-fold increase.

At the time of Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, only one American division was on a full war footing.

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.”