Seventy years ago today America began a transformation that would take it from being an inward-looking and isolationist backwater to becoming one of the greatest powers the world has ever known. The country the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941 was not the same country that would defeat them a scant three years and nine months later.
The transformation of the U.S. is all the more remarkable when you consider how ill-prepared the country really was to conduct World War II, even though that war sure seems all but inevitable in hindsight. Prior to World War II we could only count 190,000 soldiers and 464 tanks in the U.S. Army. At the time, neither the soldiers nor the tanks seemed ready for war. The soldiers’ training was generally inferior and their weapons did not compare favorably to those of other nations. In 1939, our forces were basically equal to those of Romania.