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the HATTRON. Hello and welcome to another World War II podcast.

In December last year we looked at how Churchill in 1940 kept Britain in the war.

In this episode we're crossing the pond to look at Roosevelt and America in 1940-41.

At the outbreak of war in Europe, the majority of the American people did not want to commit troops to another European war.

When much of continental Europe fell under Nazi tyranny and Britain looked over the white cliffs of Dover

to see the German army looking back and the Battle of Britain started in earnest.

American public opinion started to waver, allowing

FDR to push through measures in support of the British and the Allied War effort.

I'm joined by Mark Wartman.

He is the author of 1941, Fighting the Shadow War, which the Wall Street Journal described

as engrossing.

1941 is an absorbing worldwide epic set in that pivotal year.

Well done in the bookmark, I enjoyed it immensely and there is a lot there that I never knew on this pivotal time before America entered the war.

But let's start in 1940.

Port Poland is overrun, France and Britain are squaring up to Nazi Germany, and in China Japan has

been fighting for control since I think 1937. What was the American position? The United States was at this point

as a nation highly isolationists. It was officially neutral. Congress in the late 1930s before the war broke out had actually passed a series of neutrality acts, as they were called,

deliberately designed to prevent the US from getting entangled in another European war.

Those laws actually forbid the United States to provide any munitions or weaponry to any

...