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.

Music James Early. Welcome back to

Key Battles of the Pacific Theater of World War II.

This is your host, James, as always,

and we are now moving on to our 23rd episode,

and we are doing what I promised we would do last time, and that is we're going to take another pause to the strictly

military narrative, so we won't talk about a key battle today, but we are going to discuss

a topic, which is very important and became increasingly significant

as the war drew to an end as we got into 1914 and 45 this is a fun topic of i shouldn't say

fun there's going to be a lot of deaths in it as there always are in every episode but there's

no way to avoid that but it's a very interesting topic to me and to Scott,

my co-host, who is back with me. How are you, Dr. Rank? Doing well, good, sir. And I like to think

that we aim very high in all of our episodes, but I'm excited to aim very, very low in this episode,

even, you know, far below the surface, one could say.

Very good. Yes.

Submarine humor, ladies and gentlemen.

And we're just getting started.

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