War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding

right down to the present. War made the U.S. independent, kept it together, increased its

size, and established it as a global superpower. Understanding America's wars is essential for understanding American history.

Welcome to Key Battles of American History,

a podcast in which we discuss American history through the lens of the most important battles of America's wars.

Here is your host, James Early.

Thank you. your host, James Early. Hello and welcome back to Key Battles of World War II in Europe, our 10,000-foot

survey of the Second World War in Europe and the areas around it.

I'm your host, James Early, as always, and my co-host, as always, is Sean

McGuire. We are in the middle of a series of topical episodes, just kind of one-off

standalone episodes that really could have gone in any order, but we decided this week to talk

about American soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

This is something if you're a long-time listener to key battles of American history, you know

that I always like to push pause on the military narrative and just talk about what was it

like to be one of the boots on the ground, you know, one of the common soldiers or a sailor or seamen or in these newer wars,

an airman or air crewman, meaning by which I mean a pilot or anybody that flew on a fighter

or a bomber or any other type of plane.

So that's what we're going to do this week.

Of course, we finished the actual straight through the war narrative quite some time ago, but I'd save my topical episodes for the end. So here we go. We're going to get

started on this. There will be a little bit of overlap between this episode and the last one where

we talked about the American Home Front. So bear with us on that, but as they say, repetition is the

mother of learning. So hopefully

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