Wednesday, December 07, 2016

Remembering Pearl Harbor and World War II

Historian Craig Shirley, author of December 1941: 31 Days that Changed America and Saved the World, joined SiriusXM host Matt Boyle on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor.
“Everything changes in America,” he said. “We stop announcing ship movements and troop movements. We get used to blackouts. We get used to roadblocks. Japanese nationals begin to be rounded up. All reserves are canceled. Everybody’s to go back into their uniform, which they’d been wearing civvies most of the time. Gas rationing starts to take hold quickly, food rationing, sugar rationing, coffee rationing. Scrap metal drives, paper drives, rubber drives all take place very, very quickly after December 7th, and the nation is transformed within a matter of days and weeks after December 7th.”

“The arsenal of democracy is such that within three weeks of December 7th, Ford Motor Company, along with Fisher Auto Body and Goodyear Tire, stops producing cars – which by the way, Washington told people are complaining about Trump manipulating businesses. FDR manipulated and directed every business in America for four years,” he observed. “Washington told Detroit, ‘You are no longer to build new cars,’ and Detroit said okay. So Detroit starts churning out fabricated B-24 and B-25 bombers made out of the parts of new cars that were going to be made.”

...Shirley said it was interesting to recall that “Churchill had been lobbying FDR for months” to support Britain, which he accurately presented as the “last line of defense against Nazism,” but “there was no will in this country for getting involved in another European war after World War I.”

“Even after the attack, there’s no linkage whatsoever between the attack at Pearl Harbor and our getting into the European war. The reason we get into the European war is four days after the attack, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini declare war on the United States because of the Tripartite Pact with Japan, which was a mutual defense agreement,” he pointed out. “So, therefore, we have to respond, so we declare war on Germany and Italy. But there’s no evidence whatsoever that would have gotten involved in the European war after Pearl Harbor, until Hitler and Italy declare war on the United States.”

“The Japanese soldier fought tenaciously and to the very death because they actually preferred death to being taken hostage or being taken prisoner, so it was a long slog over all these tiny atolls and islands, over three, four thousand miles across the Pacific, to invade them and to eradicate them. Guadalcanal was the tail of a bloody, bloody conflict which took months, and many, many American lives were lost,” he said.

“And we haven’t even mentioned the wounded,” Shirley added. “We lost in World War II something like 275,000 men, I believe, but it was well over a million wounded men [who] lost limbs, lost arms, lost their eyesight, lost their hearing – in some way, shape, or form were somehow badly damaged by the war effort. The casualties were exceedingly high in some instances, like Anzio in Europe.”
Read more here.

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