On this episode of Our American Stories, America was woefully unprepared for World War II. Our army was about the size of Portugal's, our navy was outdated, and our "air force" was roughly equivalent to what the German Luftwaffe flew on a near-daily basis across Europe. Not only that, but nobody in America wanted war—or expected it to come to us. FDR was under no such delusion. We needed weapons, and we needed them fast. But how could we get it done? A.J. Baime, author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War, tells the remarkable story of how, through free enterprise, we became the strongest military power in the world.
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Our American Stories