![]() ![]() However, he argued, American soldiers ought not to have to “fight everybody in the world who prefers some other system of life to ours.” Speaking in 1941 of an “independent American destiny,” Lindbergh asserted that the United States ought to fight any nation that attempted to meddle in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. Aviator Charles Lindbergh and popular radio priest Father Charles Coughlin were the Committee’s most powerful spokesmen. Isolationist organizations like the America First Committee sought to influence public opinion through print, radio, and mass rallies. Neutrality, combined with the power of the US military and the protection of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, would keep Americans safe while the Europeans sorted out their own problems. The best policy, they claimed, was for the United States to build up its own defenses and avoid antagonizing either side. Isolationists believed that World War II was ultimately a dispute between foreign nations and that the United States had no good reason to get involved. The urgency of the situation intensified the debate in the United States over whether American interests were better served by staying out or getting involved. ![]() ![]() Great Britain was the only major European power left standing against Hitler’s war machine. Nazi Germany had annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia and had conquered Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts in the late 1930s, aiming to prevent future involvement in foreign wars by banning American citizens from trading with nations at war, loaning them money, or traveling on their ships.īut by 1940, the deteriorating global situation was impossible to ignore. Most Americans still believed the nation’s interests were best served by staying out of foreign conflicts and focusing on problems at home, especially the devastating effects of the Great Depression. Neither the rise of Adolf Hitler to power nor the escalation of Japanese expansionism did much to change the nation’s isolationist mood in the 1930s. Many Americans were disillusioned by how little their efforts had accomplished and felt that getting so deeply involved on the global stage in 1917 had been a mistake. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were either killed or wounded during that conflict, and President Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic plan to ensure permanent peace through international cooperation and American leadership failed to become a reality. The US ambivalence about the war grew out of the isolationist sentiment that had long been a part of the American political landscape and had pervaded the nation since World War I. Even as the war consumed large portions of Europe and Asia in the late 1930s and early 1940s, there was no clear consensus on how the United States should respond. Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, however, Americans were seriously divided over what the role of the United States in the war should be, or if it should even have a role at all. ![]() But in the end the British Empire and US forces attacked North Africa in 1943, then Italy in 1943 and then France in 1944.Top Image Courtesy of the Associated Pressįrom our 21st-century point of view, it is hard to imagine World War II without the United States as a major participant. Stalin wanted an invasion of German-held France in 1942 and many American commanders and politicians agreed. It might seem like Stalin’s request was reasonable. Although he appreciated this support, the Soviet leader Josef Stalin constantly pressured his allies to start a Second Front in the war which would relieve pressure on his forces in the east. Food, weapons, aircraft and many other types of supplies were sent by air and by sea on incredibly dangerous journeys. Throughout the war, the USSR was supplied by its allies in the British Empire and the US. It was a colossal conflict with an estimated thirty million deaths, a large proportion of them civilians. Germany invaded the USSR in 1941 and a bitter struggle followed which ended in Berlin in 1945. During the Second World War in Europe the majority of the fighting took place on the Eastern Front, between Germany and her allies and the forces of the Soviet Union. ![]()
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