Hoping, perhaps, to spoil my July 4th celebration, the Seattle PI columnist produced this reminiscence on World War II, and managed to get several facts wrong.  Even so, I probably would have not have bothered to do this post except for the general argument he made in this paragraph:

As well, family letters speak of a united country, fighting a competently run war, with a clear objective, and everybody contributing to the cause.

Family letters may say that, but none of those things are true.  The country was divided then, though not as openly as now.  Here's a significant poll finding from Mueller's War, Presidents, and Public Opinion:

In fact in June 1942, 6 months after Pearl Harbor, only 53 percent of the public felt it had a clear idea of what the war was about.  This proportion increased after that but approached 80 percent only in 1945 and at one point, the spring of 1944, dipped below 60 percent. (p. 63)

It is true that World War II, as measured by polls, was our most "popular" modern war, but it is also true that 14 percent of the public thought, in early 1944, that entering the war was a mistake.  (Another 9 percent were undecided.)

Nor was the war competently run.  On the whole, FDR got the grand strategy right, but he and his commanders blundered in many ways, small and large.  Here's one famous example from Stephen Ambrose's The Victors:

There were good boots available in Europe, of the type made famous by L. L. Bean after the war — well insulated, with leather uppers but rubber bottoms — but to the everlasting disgrace of the quartermasters and all other rear-echelon personnel, who were nearly all wearing them by mid-December [1944], not until late January did the boots get to where they were needed.
. . .
Trench foot put more men out of action than German 88s, mortars, or machine-gun fire.  During the winter of 1944-1945, some 45,000 men had to be pulled out of the front line because of trench foot — the equivalent of three full infantry divisions. (pp. 300-301)

Anyone familiar with World War II history can add many more blunders to that example.  Nor should we be surprised by all those blunders, since we had to create an army almost from scratch, and all through the war had to send partly-trained, and even untrained, men into combat.

Now, for some of the mistakes I noticed in a quick read:  In his sixth paragraph, Connelly says that at Midway we "sunk the four Japanese carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor".  In fact, six Japanese carriers, the Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, Soryu, Shokaku, and Zuikaku, attacked at Pearl Harbor.  Four were lost at Midway, but the last two survived until 1944.

In his seventh paragraph, Connelly says:

At Tobruk, however, the Afrika Corps took 33,000 British and Allied prisoners.  Winning the war was up to the U.S.

In fact, the British, under Montgomery, stopped the Afrika Corps at El Alamein before any American forces appeared in North Africa.  (We did help Montgomery with supplies.)  And the British did most of the fighting in the campaign to drive the Axis forces forces out of North Africa.   And, whether we like it or not, it is a fact that the Soviet Union suffered far greater losses, and destroyed a far larger portion of the German army, than we and the British combined.

Connelly ends with three "lessons" for today; all three are dubious.  Everyone was not engaged, though it is true that the newspapers were mostly on our side in that war.  (FDR considered prosecuting the Chicago Tribune for revealing secrets, but decided that such a prosecution would give even more secrets to the Japanese.)  It is also true that the opposition party then, the Republican party, was almost entirely committed to victory, unlike our modern Democratic party.  But despite that, there were immense fights over the conduct of the war between the parties, and within FDR's administration.   Nor was our objective as clear as Connelly says, especially when we remember that the British started the the war with one objective, to protect Poland from conquest, and that Stalin had rather different objectives from us and from Britain.  Nor was politics put aside, as I explained to Connelly in 2003.  For instance, FDR asked Eisenhower to speed up the 1942 landings in North Africa, in order to help the Democratic party in the fall elections.   (Eisenhower tried to do it, but couldn't make it.)

Connelly wrote the paragraph that I began with to make an indirect argument, to criticize Bush's handling of the current war.  But, anyone familiar with the real World War II, not the fantasy war that Connelly wants to use for partisan purposes, will understand that a comparison between the two makes our modern, professional forces, and many of their commanders, including President Bush, look good by contrast.  But such a comparison is silly, because the enemies we face today are so different from the enemies we faced then.

But there is one point of similarity that holds a lesson for us — and for Connelly's newspaper, the Seattle PI.  The Japanese military understood that we were far stronger than they were, economically, but they thought that they could wear us down over time, and that we would give up the fight.  Our terrorist enemies have the same belief.  I'll let Connelly decide whether his employer, the Seattle PI, may have encouraged Al Qaeda, and other terrorists, in that belief.

Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.