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the fall of France, persuaded him to do so. ‘The question of whether Roosevelt would run,’ wrote Adolf Berle, one of the president’s intimates, on 15 May that year, ‘is being settled somewhere on the banks of the Meuse River.’ The president’s equivocation was probably disingenuous since, like most national leaders, he loved power. Posterity is assured that no American was better qualified to direct the nation through the greatest emergency in world history, but an insistent minority of Roosevelt’s countrymen, notably including the business community, rejected this proposition at the time. Donald Nelson, who later became overlord of America’s industrial mobilisation, wrote: ‘Who among us except the President of the United States really saw the magnitude of the job ahead? … All the people I met and talked to, including members of the General Staff, the Army and Navy’s highest ranking officers, distinguished statesmen and legislators, thought of the defensive program only as a means of equipping ourselves to keep the enemy away from the shores of the United States.’

Rearmament had begun in May 1938, with Roosevelt’s $1.15 billion Naval Expansion Bill, followed by the November 1939 Cash-and-Carry Bill, modifying the Neutrality Act to allow belligerents – effectively, the French and British – to purchase American weapons. Roosevelt presided at a meeting of service chiefs at the White House, during which he instructed them to prepare for war and a large expansion of the armed forces. In 1940 he pushed through Congress a Selective Service Act imposing military conscription, and a $15 billion domestic rearmament programme. He delivered a personal message to the legislature declaring that he wanted the US to build 50,000 planes a year. This prompted a terse note from his chiefs of staff signed by the navy’s Admiral Harold ‘Betty’ Stark: ‘Dear Mr President, – GREAT – Betty (for all of us).’ The US Army expanded from 140,000 men in September 1939 to 1.25 million two years later, but all three chiefs of staff knew that their services remained lamentably ill-prepared to fight a big war. Many members of the armed forces as well as of the civilian community remained unconvinced either that their nation should engage, or that it would.

Young Americans conscripted under the Selective Service Act sulked in their camps: ‘An army post in peacetime is a dull place,’ wrote Carson McCullers in a 1941 novel. ‘Things happen, but then they happen over and over again … Perhaps the dullness of a post is caused most of all by insularity and by a surfeit of leisure and safety, for once a man enters the Army, he is expected only to follow the heels ahead of him.’ Journalist Eric Sevareid described how Roosevelt was ‘slowly gathering together a reluctant, bewildered and resentful army. No civil leaders dared call them “soldiers” – as though there were something shameful in the word … Few made so bold as to suggest that their job was to learn to kill.’

The hesitant military build-up included purchase of an additional 20,000 horses. ‘The US Army started far too late to prepare seriously for World War II,’ wrote Martin Blumenson. ‘As a result, the training program, the procurement of weapons, and virtually all else were hasty, largely improvised, almost chaotic, and painfully inadequate throughout the intensely short period of mobilization and organization before and after Pearl Harbor.’ Lt. Col. Dwight Eisenhower, commanding an infantry battalion at Fort Lewis, Washington, told his men: ‘We’re going to war. This country is going to war, and I want people who are prepared to fight that war.’ But such rhetoric merely earned him the derisive nickname ‘Alarmist Ike’.

Many intellectuals disdained Europe’s war because they perceived it as a struggle between rival imperialisms, a view reflected in Quincy Howe’s 1937 tract England Expects Every American to do His Duty. They found it easier to contemplate an explicitly American crusade against fascism than one that allied them with the old European nations, recoiling from association with the preservation of