I've started Rick Atkinson's An Army at Dawn, The War in North Africa, 1942-1943. How ill-prepared we were to fight World War II, at least in the European theater: "Two years, three months, and seven days had passed since the invasion of Poland, and the United States had needed every minute of that grace period to prepare for war. Churchill's chief military representative in Washington, Field Marshal Sir John Dill, told London that, notwithstanding the long prelude, American forces 'are more unready for war than it is possible to imagine.' "In September 1939, the U.S. Army had ranked seventeenth in the world in size and combat power, just behind Romania. When those 136 German divisions conquered western Europe nine months later, the War Department reported that it could field just five divisions. Even the homeland was vulnerable: some coastal defense guns had not been test-fired in twenty years, and the Army lacked enough anti-aircraft guns to protect even a single American city. The building of the armed forces was likened to 'the reconstruction of a dinosaur around an ulna and three vertebrae.'" And the raw material that would eventually make up the invincible American Army? "A Gallup poll of October 1940 found a prevailing view of American youth as 'a flabby, pacifistic, yellow, cynical, discouraged, and leftist lot.'" Despite the lack of an adequate army, as soon as war was declared against us, American Generals wanted to invade France and go after the Germans immediately. That, the consensus of historical opinion seems to be from what I've read, would have been a colossal blunder. We may have been able to put warm bodies in the field, but they were no match for the Germans. Churchill talked Roosevelt out of operation "Sledgehammer," not merely because he felt the Americans were not ready to tackle the Germans right away, but also because the Germans had recently chased the British out of Europe, and Churchill felt that if the British, even if accompanied by the Americans, were to cross the channel to soon, it would be more of the same. Atkinson writes, "The American military had been animated mostly by can-do zeal and a desire to win expeditiously; these traits eventually would help carry the day, but only when tempered with battle experience and strategic sensibility." That battle experience and strategic sensibility would begin development in North Africa in 1942. Lawrence Helm San Jacinto