Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. Last Sunday was December 7^th. I wonder how many of you gave that day serious thought. My guest today will help us do that. Craig Shirley is a political consultant and a noted biographer of Ronald Reagan, and he’s also the author of, "December 1941: 31 Days that Changed America and Saved the World." Mr. Shirley, welcome to the program.

Craig Shirley: Thank you, Grant, thank you very much.

GR: We appreciate you making the time to be with us. So let me just start with a kind of a basic question about this historical event. What do you think is the most important thing about either the Pearl Harbor attack or its immediate aftermath that most Americans don’t know today?

CS: Well, I think the most obvious is that it completely changed America's outlook from being an isolationist country to becoming an internationalist country, that changed overnight. Isolationism had been prevalent in the United States from the end of World War One right up until December 7th, 1941. You know, there was a saying going around America after World War One that all we got was death, debt and George M. Cohan, and we became an increasingly internationalist country as we limited immigration from Japan as we passed various neutrality acts in the 1930s, passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic president. And by 1941, everybody was isolationist. FDR, the White House, everybody knew war was coming, but everybody also had their head in the sand and wanted to avoid war at all costs with either Germany, Italy or Japan.

GR: Yeah. You know, your answer is interesting because it, that's exactly the question I was going to ask you a little bit later, but I'll follow up on it now. I was going to point to that isolation, but you already described it very well. And the fact that this was a very quick pivot point, I mean, it just, like you say, this changed overnight. And I was trying to think of, have there been any other similar moments in our history like that? The only thing that I could come up with was maybe the firing on Fort Sumter, but even then there was a lot of lead up to that and so I couldn't, you know, yeah.

CS: Yes. There was, I'm trying to think also, I suppose after, during the War of 1812, we barred immigration, obviously, from Great Britain and also, not from France, but from Great Britain and we became, we were somewhat of an isolationist country more because of the distance than anything else until Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay. And then we, obviously the Spanish-American War was an internationalist war. But we've gone through periods, you know, where we've been isolationist and internationalist and isolationist and internationalists again, but we've been pretty much internationalists since 1941, sometimes more expansively, other times less expansively. But even Trump, you know, people say he's an isolationist, but he did, he solved eight wars around the world. He’s solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and he's trying to stop the war in Ukraine. So even, you know, so he's accused of that, but it's really not true. It's just that I don't think he's as activist as other presidents have been in the past.

GR: Certainly seems more reluctant than previous presidents to commit ground troops and that seems to be a line that he has drawn on that. Well let me, let me go back to the, yeah go ahead.

CS: Let me just say one thing, Grant, is just that anti-communism animated a lot of that response on our part from 1946 up until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991.

GR: Right, right, yes, that was a that was a major part of our internationalism. Well, let me go back to this attack of the Japanese. And I think looking back on it now, it's hard, I think, to believe that an attack of that magnitude could have surprised the Americans so much. So how did the Japanese pull that off?

CS: You know, military planners still study it today because of the precision it was carried off with, because of the professionalism, obviously, the stealth that it was carried off with. Because don't forget, is that on December 7th and 8th, the Japanese just didn't hit Honolulu, they just didn't hit Pearl Harbor, they hit Wake Island, they hit the Philippines, they hit Indochina. They hit, you know, a half dozen different locations simultaneously orchestrated and organized, all at the same time, which was really, you know, just from the standpoint of accomplishment, it was a masterstroke in a way, because, you know, I mean, you just didn't think that they could get away with that. Of course they'd already been in China and they'd already gotten into bad relations with the United States because of their rape of Nan King and they probably murdered 250,000 civilians when they invaded China in 1939. So there was already bad blood there between the United States. I always believed China was an ally of the United States in 1939. But, I’m losing train of my thought, I guess, but is that we did everything we could to avoid war with Japan. The secretary of state, you know, set out a four point plan. He offered the Japanese something like $25 million, we would lift the oil embargo, we would lift the junk metal embargo and Japan, in turn, had to sign a proclamation of peace and that they would invade no more countries and they rejected this. So we really tried to avoid war with Japan before December 7th.

GR: Was it maybe the surprise then came from a little bit of wishful thinking that we would avoid that war?

CS: It was absolutely it was wishful thinking. But you know, it was also, you know, they moved a carrier fleet, four of their first line carriers and escort ships 4000 miles across the Pacific without being detected, then launched this completely surprise attack using 300 planes on Pearl Harbor. And when they did so, it reminded me what Frank Borman said. Frank Borman was an astronaut who was charged with the investigation of the fire of Apollo 1, and when he was testifying before Congress a senator asked him, he says, how did this happen? And he says, Senator, it was a failure of imagination. And that's what happened here, we just didn't believe, we didn't imagine that the Japanese would be so audacious or they would be so intent on war, Tojo was intent on a war. That they could transport these four carriers plus escort ships, refueling ships, and I think they made two stops in the Atlantic or the Pacific to refuel, then carried on, and then withdrew their forces without ever getting harmed whatsoever, not even a shot fired at them. And it was just, we never imagined that they would take that monumental step and initiate World War Two.

GR: I’m Grant Reeher, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations, and my guest is Craig Shirley. He’s the author of, "December 1941: 31 Days that Changed America and Saved the World." So, we got a bit lucky, though, as bad as the attack was that day, regarding our navy. Briefly remind us of how that happened.

CS: Well, you're absolutely right, we were lucky in a number of ways. The Japanese main target was the, was our four aircraft carriers that were there, stationed at Pearl Harbor. But they had only recently left, two went back to San Diego to be repaired. One was down in the Coral Sea, that was Bill Halsey's carrier. He was out at sea, and so none of the carriers were actually there in Pearl Harbor, so they escaped the carnage. We were also lucky in another regard. And people have thought about this, is that everybody in America was mad that we didn't go out and attack the Japanese after they attacked us. But if we sent our ships out, they would have been slaughtered, we would've been wiped out. The Japanese ships had much better firepower, much thicker plating, and could survive an attack, whereas their shells would have gone right through the hulls of most of our ships. The ships were built much more for speed than for protection. And they would have been, the whole, you know, instead of losing 3,000 men as we did on December 7th, we would have lost maybe 30,000 men if we got into an open fight with the Japanese.

GR: And had much less of a navy.

CS: Yes.

GR: So, you obviously get into a lot of the stories about heroism and sacrifice on that day. Is there one story that sticks with you the most, after you wrote the book?

CS: Well, I got to think about that one, Grant, because there's so many stories.

GR: Yeah, it’s a tough question.

CS: There's so many stories. There's, is that the heroism of the nurses treating the injured, the badly injured sailors at the hospital, that in itself is worth a book right there. The nurses who have been killed, nurses who have been injured, who still managed to get back to the hospital and managed to treat many of the wounded, you know, in surgeries and drawing blood and, you know, applying anesthesia and doing whatever they could, so that in itself is one. I think also, you know, you have to say, Dory Miller's actions when she received the Navy Cross for need to be cited. Dory Miller was an African-American, was a ship's steward, was not trained for combat. And it's interesting, too, he was named Dory because his real name was Doris. And the story is, his father, his mother and father had five sons, and the father wanted a daughter, and he ended up with, Dory was the sixth and the father named Doris, even though h...

Craig Shirley on the Campbell Conversations