Quote:
Originally posted by Troels
Uhm, If I'm not mistaken England asked for the US to help them against Hitler, but your country was experiencing an economic upturn after the depression, so neither your leaders OR the public wanted to be involved in the war.
You agreed to sell goods to England though, but they had to use their own transports to maintain US neutrality towards Hitler.
Heads in the sand?
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Close, but not quite. The U.S. stuck to the same idiotic "nonintervention" policies that allowed the facists to take control of Spain a lot longer than England did - easier to do in the days before ICBMs. While a great many in the U.S. were aware of the danger, and the Roosevelt administration was doing its best to help whereever possible, there was a large isolationist movement at the time. Inspired in part because of a geneuine hatred for war, in some cases admiration for the Nazi/Facist causes, and even a few instances of payoffs and bribery by the Nazis, they were a powerful force right up until Pearl Harbor.
Technically, we were at war with the Germans as early as the spring of 1940, when Roosevelt ordered the Navy and Coast Guard to go after any submarines attempting to sink any ships in a zone that extended far into international waters.
The strange thing is, the political descendants of the Isolationists and anti-internationalists are now the ones arguing for unilateral action.