Craig Shirley on Memorial Day: World War II Soldiers and Civilians Made ‘Ultimate Sacrifice’ Without Complaint
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Craig Shirley, author of the seminal Ronald Reagan biographies Last Act: The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan, Reagan’s Revolution, and Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America, was a guest on the Breitbart News Daily Memorial Day special edition.
Shirley is also the author of an important book on one of the most significant months in all of history, December 1941: 31 Days that Changed America and Saved the World. This was the work SiriusXM host Alex Marlow asked about in light of Memorial Day.
Shirley noted that December 1941 marked America’s entry into World War II two years after the beginning of “a war that we swore we would never get involved in.”
“We didn’t want to get involved. There was an America First movement which rose up, which pressured the Roosevelt administration – civic leaders, business leaders, military leaders, everybody in America. There wasn’t anybody who really was for getting involved in another war,” he recalled.
“We had a bad taste in our mouth after World War I. There was a saying going around America after World War I that all we got was debt, death, and George M. Cohan,” he said, the latter being the lyricist who wrote the enduring anthem of the First World War, “Over There.”
Shirley described America as “essentially isolationist” after the horrors of World War I, until the Pearl Harbor attack, followed by Germany and Italy’s declarations of war the following week, “changed our outlook instantaneously.”
“World War II was the first, and really the last, war in which the government called on the American people to make ultimate sacrifices, and they did so – gladly, willingly, happily. The refrain at the time, if somebody complained about coffee rationing at the local grocery store, the grocer would look at you and say, ‘Hey, there’s a war on.’ Everybody sacrificed”.
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