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. James Early. Hello and welcome to another special bonus episode of Key Battles of the Pacific

Theater World War II.

This is your host, James, as always.

And in this episode, I'm going to give you part two of the miniseries that I started last time on the role of U.S. presidents, or future

U.S. presidents, I should say, in World War II. As I mentioned at the beginning of the first

episode in this mini-series,

I'm not going to discuss FDR or Truman because even though they were the commanders in chief,

they were not actually on active duty in the military during World War II. And I'm not going to

discuss Eisenhower, one, because he was not in the Pacific, and two, because he

was such a top commander. And Eisenhower, there's so much you could say about him. You could do

a whole long series just on his actions and his role and his career during the war itself.

So I started with Kennedy, and Kennedy was the earliest president,

chronologically speaking, who was in World War II, but was not commander-in-chief or

Supreme Commander of Allied forces in the European theater. Kennedy served in the Navy, had a lot of adventures,

commanded a PT boat for a while. Then we talked about Johnson, who did not have active combat service,

...