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 to our new series called Key Films of World War II, European Theater of Operations.

This is your host, James Early, as always.

And of course, I've got my good buddy fellow history buff and fellow film aficionado, Sean McIver.

Now, listeners, if you listen to my Pacific War series, which came out quite a while ago,

you'll remember that I did all the battles and all the political episodes and everything that was just

the straight history, all in one long series. And then, John and I did a pretty long series on

films about the Pacific Theater World War II. So you could say we did them in series.

But I discovered, to my great surprise, that there are actually people out there

that do not like war movies. I don't understand that, but I mean, I understand it on an

intellectual level, but so I don't want to do that again this time. So we're not going to do

all the battles and all the political episodes and everything, and then follow it with a long,

long series of film episodes. We're going to do them in parallel. So what we're going to try

to do is each week, we're going to, or most weeks at least, we'll have two episodes. We're

going to have a battles episode or a political episode that leads up to a battles episode. And then maybe on

Saturday or on the weekends, we'll release an episode in which we discuss a film that is over

the subject we discussed earlier in the week when we did the political or the battles episode.

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