This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, and our favorite subject, history.

Stephen Ambrose was one of America's leading biographers and historians, and at the core

of Ambrose's success was his simple belief that history is biography, that history is about

people.

Ambrose passed in 2002, but his storytelling can now be heard here at Our American Stories

thanks to those who run as a state.

Here's Ambrose telling the story of the year 1941, a year that would bring the United States into World War II in December after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

As the year opened, the aggressors were on the march around the world.

Mussolini had overrun Ethiopia and was about to launch an attack out of Albania that he had recently conquered down into Greece.

The Japanese had taken Manchuria, had taken much of eastern China, were at war with the Red Army in Mongolia in 1939 and in 1940,

and were laying plans to move even further south after their conquest in the fall of 1940 of French

Indochina moving down towards Buries Malaya and the Dutch East Indies.

So aggression was being rewarded and especially so in Hitler's case where at the

beginning of 1940,

he stood astride the continent like a colossus,

more so even than Napoleon, more than the Holy Roman emperors, more than Julius Caesar.

He was the greatest conqueror the world has seen.

At the beginning of 1941, Hitler either had an alliance with or was in military occupation

of all of Europe from the Black Sea through what used to be Poland

up to Lithuania. Poland had disappeared from the map. Germany had annexed the eastern

two-fourths of Poland, excuse me, the Western two-fourths of Poland, and the Russians

had the eastern half. And so Poland was off the

...