Here’s an e-mail that makes a good point regarding my recent column on sonar and whales.

“Dear Mr. Lowry:

As a second -generation Nat. Review subscriber, I offer my compliments on your article on the threat posed by subs in the hands of our enemies. I only wish your observations had been amplified by familiarity with Michael Gannon’s fine book “Operation Drumbeat”, documenting the havoc wrought by German subs in early 1942 not along Britain’s shores, but our own… a largely preventable debacle Gannon calls our “Atlantic Pearl Harbor”.

The Brits, at least, did their best, during the darkest days of the Allied struggle against the U-boats, to reduce their losses through such measures as a coastal blackout…something the U.S. did not impose on itself until the hulls and bones of hundreds of ships and sailors were littering our coastal seabed from Cape May to Cape Canaveral.

It seems the unconscionable complacency about the sub menace of that day has its counterpart in the San Francisco Court’s overweening concern for whales today. Or is it really that body’s veiled hostility toward the military? Or could it reflect the sad possibility that this generation of U.S. civilians, like that earlier one, simply won’t get serious about being at war until the country has sustained two hard hits. Back then it was Pearl Harbor and Drumbeat; today: 9/11 and…?”