The Myth of Pearl Harbours
Most explanations of wars assume that one nation should be totally or mainly blamed. Indeed the debate about blame usually begins before the threat of the enemy. As the war persists, the debate circles the globe by satellite and short wave. At the end of the war the victor often tries to close the debate by affirming in the peace treaty that the loser caused the war, but that does not close the debate.
The idea that one nation must have caused a war intrinsically satisfies us. It is difficult to examine the out break of any war without searching for the warmaker. It is also difficult to resist the conclusion that if one nation started the war it must have caused the war. Moreover in most wars it seems easy to identify the nation which initiated the war. Thus one can suggest that in 1904 Japan initiated the war against Russia, that in 1914 Austria initiated the war against Serbia, and that in 1950 North Korea initiated the war against South Korea.
But then one examines more closely those wars in which the outbreak is clearly assigned to one nation, the clarity often vanishes. If the question is asked - why did they, rather than their enemy, fire the first shot - extenuating circumstances multiply. When Japan attacked Russia in 1904, it was partly in response to the dispatch of Russian ships and troops to eastern Asia and the failure of diplomatic negotiations. When the United States attacked Britain in 1812 it was partly in response to many British attacks on neutral American merchant ships; in that sense open warfare had replaced intermittent warfare. When Britain declared war on Napoleonic France in 1803, she was partly replying to the French invasion of Switzerland. The British fleet which attacked French ships in the North Atlantic in 1754 responded to the crisis in North America where British and French colonists were already fighting intermittently. The Prussian attack on Austria in 1778 was provoked by the Austrians' annexation of to Algeria in 1830 they were answering countless episodes of Algerian piracy on the high seas. When Greece intervened in 1897 in the civil war in the Turkish island of Grete she was applying armed force to a situation where it was already the arbiter. And when France declared war on Prussia in 1870 she was responding to provocation. Here were eight different situations which preceded the outbreak of war, and those provocative situations applied to a majority of wars fought since 1700.Nor is it enough to trace back the retaliation or provocation only one step, for a series of threats or incidents usually preceded the beginning of wars.
