Very interesting material. Sadly, I think our attitudes towards the Japanese help lull us into complacency prior to Pearl Harbor. The prevailing popular image of Japan back in those days was of a small, imitative Asian people who lived in ramshackle paper cities and made cheap inferior products. The idea that they could reach across the Pacific and catch us napping just seemed inconcievable...especially with some of the rampant racism that was a large part of the times. Many wild conspiracy theories kicked about after the attack that it was actually the Germans in Japanese marked planes who conducted the actual operation.
The attitude even persisted after Pearl Harbor. The public was lulled into overconfidence by dispatches from Clark Lee, the Associated Press correspondent in Manila, which derided the ability of the Japanese fighting man and the quality of his equipment. A competent newsman, Lee was merely repeating what he had been told by American military men. "The Japanese Army is an ill-informed, untrained mass of young boys between 15 and 18 years old, equipped with small-caliber guns and driven forward by desperate deterimination to advance or die." Their .25-caliber rifle and machine gun bullets could not even kill a man. "They're no damned good on the ground," he quoted one cavalry colonel. "These Charlies--we call them Charlies--can't shoot. Somebody gets hit about every 5,000 shots."
MacArthur himself knew this was ridiculous. That's why he hightailed it for Bataan.
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--Mobilis in Mobili--
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