Marked location quad city international airport, airport entrance, moline, il 61265, united states10/3/2023 In an address to Congress on May 16, 1940, he urged Americans to ramp up war production, especially of airplanes, tanks and other heavy equipment. Instead, he urged the nation to improve its defenses and reinitiated a national draft in case war should arrive on American shores. Roosevelt did not try to convince them otherwise, at least not directly. But according to pollster George Gallup, a majority of Americans still felt that the war was a European problem, and that rushing to the aid of France would involve American boys in a pointless debacle like World War I. “France’s only hope was the United States,” he added, reciting pleas from Parisians for the U.S. “As the 41st week of the war came to a close,” an American reporter wrote back to Washington, “the mighty German army appeared to be writing … an obituary for the France of liberté, égalité, et fraternité.”Īdolf Hitler in front of the Eiffel Tower during the Nazis' occupation of Paris On June 14, 1940, Adolf Hitler’s troops marched triumphantly into Paris, unfurling a swastika over the Arc de Triomphe. During a few days in early May, the Nazi army blitzed into Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland and finally France, where the fabled French Army crumpled at the Maginot Line. If the invasion of Poland in September 1939 produced a shiver of fear in the United States, the invasion of France in the spring of 1940 instilled a lasting sense of dread.
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