Really happy to have you here. So on July 10th, 1940, the German Air Force started its large-scale

attack on our closest overseas ally on Great Britain. That was the start of the Battle of Britain.

And at that point, Great Britain was the last man standing in Western Europe.

The Germans had spread out into Austria and then into Czechoslovakia.

And then they took Poland and Denmark and Norway and Belgium and the Netherlands and Luxembourg and France.

Nazi Germany was just rolling through all of those countries. And at the end, Britain was it. Starting July 10th, 1940, the might of the German

Air Force turned its sights to destroying and ultimately trying to take Britain as well, because they wanted all of it.

They wanted all of Europe. And at that point, the United States had to decide what we were going to do.

Here was not just our closest overseas ally, but here was the last country standing in the way of

total Nazi domination of all of Europe, which is what

Hitler seemed to want to use not only for its own ends, but he seemed to want to use that as the

cornerstone of a global Third Reich. Nazi world domination. And here's a little Great Britain

standing as the last thing between them in control of that continent.

So what were we going to do? What President Roosevelt wanted to do was help our ally, help Great Britain stand up to the Nazis, help them hold the line.

FDR expended a huge amount of political capital to do that and also just capital,

money, to send Britain as much support as he could manage short of us getting into the war

ourselves in 1940. That's what FDR did. That is what we remember the United States doing as a

country. But at the time, it definitely

wasn't like a consensus decision. That is definitely what President Roosevelt wanted to do, but

lots of other people in the country did not want to do that at all. Remember that date? July

10th, that's when the German Air Force started attacking the British mainland. July 10th. Exactly one month later, on August 10th, 1940, a sitting U.S. Senator gave a national speech on the radio in which he demanded that England should say thank you to us. They should be way more grateful. They should show us some

respect. Frankly, all our allies should for all that we've done for them. And it was time,

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