This article originally appeared in its Spanish form in El Diario.
War was inevitable. The United States – despite its “neutrality” and even without considering the huge supply of raw materials and war machinery it would send to the United Kingdom in the near future – was the only country capable of standing in the way of Japan’s expansionist wishes. In February 1940, in a gesture that did not go unnoticed, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the transfer of the entire Pacific military fleet from their naval bases in California to the Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, a movement that was seen by Japan as a serious and potential threat to its interests.
“Echoes of two wars, 1936-1945” aims to disseminate the stories of those Basques and Navarrese who participated in two of the warfare events that defined the future of much of the 20th century. With this blog, the intention of the Sancho de Beurko Association is to rescue from anonymity the thousands of people who constitute the backbone of the historical memory of the Basque and Navarre communities, on both sides of the Pyrenees, and their diasporas of emigrants and descendants, with a primary emphasis on the United States, during the period from 1936 to 1945.
Guillermo Tabernilla is a researcher and founder of the Sancho de Beurko Association, a non-profit organization that studies the history of the Basques and Navarrese from both sides of the Pyrenees in the Spanish Civil War and in World War II. He is currently their secretary and community manager. He is also editor of the digital magazine Saibigain. Between 2008 and 2016 he directed the catalog of the “Iron Belt” for the Heritage Directorate of the Basque Government and is, together with Pedro J. Oiarzabal, principal investigator of the Fighting Basques Project, a memory project on the Basques and Navarrese in the Second World War in collaboration with the federation of Basque Organizations of North America.
Pedro J. Oiarzabal is a Doctor in Political Science-Basque Studies, granted by the University of Nevada, Reno (USA). For two decades, his work has focused on research and consulting on public policies (citizenship abroad and return), diasporas and new technologies, and social and historical memory (oral history, migration and exile), with special emphasis on the Basque case. He is the author of more than twenty publications. He has authored the blog “Basque Identity 2.0” by EITB and “Diaspora Bizia” by EuskalKultura.eus. On Twitter @Oiarzabal.
Josu M. Aguirregabiria is a researcher and founder of the Sancho de Beurko Association and is currently its president. A specialist in the Civil War in Álava, he is the author of several publications related to this topic, among which “La batalla de Villarreal de Álava” (2015) y “Seis días de guerra en el frente de Álava. Comienza la ofensiva de Mola” (2018) stand out.
Japan aspired to be the leader of a new political order in Asia at the cost of seizing the British, French, Dutch, and American colonial territories, and thus extending, without hindrance, its influence in the rest of Southeast Asia. And as such it was recognized by the western powers of Germany and Italy through the Tripartite Pact of September 27, 1940. Previously, after the fall of France into the hands of Nazi Germany, Japan had invaded French Indochina (Vietnam) on September 22, 1940. As a reaction, the US suspended all exports to Japan, including oil, which accounted for 80% of the total obtained by the country of the Rising Sun. The situation was critical and the only solution was to neutralize the US on its way to the Dutch East Indies, which held significant oil reserves that could feed its insatiable war economy.
Some thirty ships, including six aircraft carriers with 420 aircraft on board, and 16,000 men from the Imperial Navy of Japan, crossed about 5,600 kilometers (3,500 miles) of the Pacific Ocean, undetected, with the aim of ending the meddling of the United States with a preventative attack that would theoretically mean the end of its fleet on the West Coast .
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