SOUTH PORTLAND — June 4, 1942, 10:20 a.m. local time, 175 miles northwest of Midway Atoll, north-central Pacific.
Vice Adm. Chuichi Nagumo strode the bridge of Akagi, flagship of a powerful Japanese carrier strike force that six months earlier had decimated American ships at anchor at Pearl Harbor and then marauded through the western Pacific, taking the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, British Malaya, Singapore, Guam and Wake Island.
The aim of this new offensive was to occupy Midway, destroy what remained of the U.S. Fleet and drive American forces back to the West Coast.
The day had begun well with a devastating first strike on Midway, the returning planes being rearmed for a final coup de grace. It was the high water mark of the Japanese Empire, those final few minutes when a Pacific Ocean dominated by the Land of the Rising Sun still loomed possible.
Then a Japanese scout plane spotted American carriers to the northeast. The same thing had happened a month earlier in the Coral Sea when American carriers appeared unexpectedly and turned back a Japanese invasion of Port Moresby on the doorstep to Australia. American cryptographers had broken the Japanese naval code and were reading their every move, but with the arrogance born of success and believing their code was unbreakable, the Japanese never suspected.
Nagumo ordered his aircraft rearmed to attack the American carriers, with the result that his flight decks were littered with munitions. The first American attack came at wave-top level by 41 torpedo bombers that scored not a single hit, losing 37 of their number. Then American dive bombers from two carriers arrived over the Japanese at exactly the same time and turned the weapons-strewn decks of three Japanese carriers into sinking, raging infernos.
The Japanese withdrew from Midway and began the retreat that would end at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thus making those five minutes when American dive bombers rained down death from on high one of the most spectacular sudden reversals of national fortune in history. It was a defeat born of arrogance.
So, too, for the recent election. Hillary Clinton was the anointed one – anointed by the mainstream media, academia, Hollywood, intellectuals, feminists, coastal elites – everyone who wasn’t working-class middle America.
She’d been preparing since childhood, went to the best Eastern schools, stuck with her philandering husband as first lady in Arkansas and Washington (would she have done so had Bill been a plumber?), blew the 2008 nomination by underestimating Barack Obama, then blew her secretary of state stint by setting up a private email server.
Why would she do something so reckless? Because she and her team “wanted to get away with it,” said Clinton adviser Neera Tanden. It was arrogance.
She pledged to maintain a wall of separation between her State Department duties and the Clinton Foundation, and then she didn’t. It was arrogance.
She lied about the Benghazi attack being caused by a video, according to family members of people killed there. She described 50 percent of Donald Trump’s supporters as “deplorables.” And never after the April primary did she visit the swing state of Wisconsin, which she lost. It was arrogance.
And she underestimated Trump – arrogance on steroids.
Yet still she was expected to win, and when the polls closed in the East at 8 p.m. on Nov. 8, Democrats looked forward to taking the Senate, major House gains, some governorships, controlling the Supreme Court for a generation, and a Republican Party in utter disarray. It was the high water mark of modern American liberalism.
Then, at 10:22, Ohio was called for Trump, then North Carolina, then Florida, then – gasp – Wisconsin. Pennsylvania was anticlimactic – it was over. Republicans had achieved their highest level of national dominance since 1928, and it was the Democratic Party that was in shambles. As with the Japanese, it was a defeat born of arrogance.
Even after being surprised by the Americans at Coral Sea and Midway, the Japanese refused to believe that their naval code could be broken, and they paid dearly. In April 1943 American codebreakers deciphered Japanese message traffic indicating that Isoroku Yamamoto, fleet admiral and Pearl Harbor attack mastermind, would be visiting the Japanese base at Rabaul. American aircraft arrived off Rabaul at exactly the right time and sent Yamamoto to a fiery death.
Democrats, meanwhile, have responded to the Rust Belt revolution that elected Donald Trump by re-electing San Francisco liberal Nancy Pelosi as House minority leader and are considering Minnesota U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, a far-left progressive and a Muslim, to head the Democratic National Committee, acts of – shall I say it – breathtaking arrogance.
They’ll go down in flames like Yamamoto.
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