Pearl Harbor, belated anniversary remembrance

I'm back to Churchill, and he's looking at Japan's entrance into the war. They were invading China off and on for years, without justification. They were tempted to conquer Holland's, France's, and Great Britain's territories in Indo-China, while those mother countries were occupied with war at home.

"All the great Americans round the President [advisors] and in his confidence felt, as acutely as I did, the awful danger that Japan would attack British or Dutch possessions in the Far East, and would carefully avoid the United States, and that in consequence Congress would not sanction an American declaration of war.. The American leaders understood that this might mean vast Japanese conquests, which, if combined with a German victory over Russia and thereafter an invastion of Great Britain, would leave Amercia alone to face an overwhelming combination of triumphant aggressors.... the very life of the United States, and their people, as yet but half-awakened to theri perils, might be broken.... [The President and his advisors] had writhed under the restraints of a Congress whose House of Representatives had a few months before passed by only a single vote the necessary renewal of [the draft] without which their Army would have been almost disbanded in the midst of the world convulsion.... A Japanese attack upon the United States was a vast simplification of their problems and their duty. How can we wonder that they regarded the actual form of the attack, or even its scale, as incomparably less important than the fact that the whole American nation would be united for its own safety in a righteous cause as never before?"

Hmmm. So there is a sense in which Pearl Harbour was welcomed by Americans who wanted to fight Hitler: it united the country against the Axis powers. Pearl Harbor was the price to pay to gain the American unity needed to fight effectively. But why must it always take such a large price to get people to fight the battle?

It remained a mystery to Churchill why Japan attacked us, instead of the Dutch East Indies. They antagonized a much more powerful enemy. It may have had to do with saving face back home in Japan, when the USA in negotiations with them asked for a complete pull-out from China... Any way it could have gone, thank God for His common grace that brought our force into the war against Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini.