Having lived the war with Alan Brooke I am doing it all over again with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. A friend, the same friend who gave me Tommy Lascelles’ diaries, has given me No Ordinary Time – Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
I’m only on page twenty-three but am enjoying getting to know the Roosevelts. Did you know FDR served as President for an unprecedented four terms? I didn’t. I didn’t know that he got polio as an adult in 1921, nor did I know that he had an affair with Eleanor’s social secretary in 1918 that changed the dynamic of his marriage.
Looking at the larger picture, the Allies needed America to come into the war as much as in the first war. The mighty United States army would save Europe from tyranny but how mighty was the US militarily?
“In 1940 the US Army stood only eighteenth in the world, trailing not only Germany, France, Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan and China but also Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. With the fall of Holland, the United States would rise to seventeenth! And, in contrast to Germany, where after years of compulsory military training nearly 10 percent of the population (6.8 million) were trained and ready for war, less than 0.5 percent of the American population (504,000) were on active duty or in the trained reserves. The offensive Germany had launched the morning of May 10 (1940) along the Western front was supported by 136 divisions; the United States could, if necessary, muster merely five fully equipped divisions.” (No Ordinary Time)
There was little appetite in America for another European war, one that had scarred so many families, and at such a dire time economically – The Great Depression. So why and how did it happen that America’s military contribution on the Western Front exceeded by far Britain’s and that America was also able to fight Japan in the Pacific? That’s what I’m going to find out in Doris’s Pulitzer Prize winner