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. host, James Early. Hello and welcome to another episode of 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 McIver. We are in the middle of a four-part series, which we're calling our epilogue,

or massive epilogue. You may recall in our last episode, we talked about some of the changes

that the Second World War wrought on Europe,

on America, and on other places. So we saw a lot of changes were made, a lot of major

changes. And we're going to shift gears. And in this episode, we're going to follow a longstanding

key battles of American history tradition. And we are going to focus on key leaders in the war.

We're going to tell you what happened to just the top of the top leaders after the war, and what went on with their career and their life, and when did they die, and how old were they?

So this is a tradition going all the way back to my Civil War series many years ago.

And it's one of my favorite things to do.

So we're going to jump right into it just a minute.

And again, we can't possibly cover every single person.

You may be thinking, well, what about so-and-so?

What about so-and-so?

...