Mike wrote --

> It is a shame that people do not learn much about history any more... or maybe it is what they are "learning" about it that is the shame.  

  There is so much revisionist history out there today.  Some people think
its not nice to mention something an enemy at one time did, it might hurt
their feelings.  Or its somehow "racist".  
  I recently slogged my way through A History of the American People, by
some crackpot I have heard about for some year.  His name escapes me right
now. He wrote nothing America has done was good, all the bad things we did to
this or that group of people, sta
  I could only read a few pages at a time before my head started to
explode.  
  This nutjob's book is used as a text in many schools.
  I found it free on the net.  I didn't want him to earn a dime off me.

> I have heard it said that WWII didn't really start with the German invasion of Poland in 1939, but instead with the Japanese attack on Shanghai in August, 1937, at the start of the second China-Japan war.

  Sounds about right.

> From everything I have learned about it, Japan did not think they
> could win a war with the US.  They hoped that, by hitting Pearl Harbour
> fast and hard, they could convince us to stay out of it.  Boy did they mess up.

  Maybe not convince us to stay out, but slow down our entry, for sure.
  Thankfully our carriers were at sea at the time.
  When Billy Mitchell demonstrated in the early '20s a plane could sink a
battleship the American Navy scoffed and said no way.  A group of Japanese
military (our ally in The Great War) were busy taking notes.
  Joe