America's Involvement in World War II.
When war broke out, there was no way the world could possibly know what was going to happen. Fortunately one country saw and understood that Germany and its allies would have to be stopped. America's involvement in World War II not only contributed in the fall of the crazy Adolph Hitler and his allies. Had the United Stated entered the war any earlier the consequences might have been worse.
Over the years it has been an often heated and argued issue on whether the United States could have entered the war sooner and then have probably saved more lives. To understand this we must look at both the people and government's point of view.
Just after war broke out in Europe, President Roosevelt hurriedly called his cabinet and military advisors together. There it was agreed that the United States would stay neutral in these affairs. One of the reasons given was that unless America was directly threatened they had no reason to be involved. This reason was an acceptable because it was the American policy to stay neutral in any affairs not having to do with them unless American soil was threatened. The Neutrality Act passed the senate seventy nine votes to two in 1935. On August 31, Roosevelt signed it into law. In 1936 the law was renewed, and in 1937 a "comprehensive and permanent" neutrality act was passed. (Overy 259).
The desire to avoid "foreign entanglements" of all kinds had been an American foreign policy for more than a century. A very real "geographical Isolation" permitted the United States to "fill up the empty lands of North America free from the threat of foreign conflict." (Churchill 563).
Even if Roosevelt had wanted to do more in this European crisis, there was a factor too often ignored by critics of American policy and the American military weaknesses. When he was asked to evaluate how many troops were available if and when the United States would get involved, the army could only gather an amount of one hundred thousand, when the French, Russian, and Japanese armies numbered in millions.
