It’s 1943, a quarter century after the armistice that ended the so-called Great War, and Americans are once again fighting in foreign lands, battling the ascendant Empire of Japan in the Pacific and confronting Germany’s Afrika Corp along the southern rim of the Mediterranean Sea.
The country had been divided over whether to enter the war. Isolationists opposed sacrificing American lives to save the democracies of Western Europe. And thousands of Nazi sympathizers openly trumpeted support for Adolf Hitler. Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 unleashed a patriotic fervor that seemed to settle the question, but in some quarters, opposition to the war still ran deep.