peace at any price, the British and French countenanced the take-over of western Czechoslovakia under the terms of the Munich treaty. The folly of appeasement became undeniably clear the following year when Hitler's war machine roared into Germany's neighbor to the east, Poland, starting World War II in Europe.
At first Roosevelt proclaimed U.S. neutrality while doing what he could to assist the French and British. In 1939 the president persuaded the Congress to pass the "cash and carry" amendment to the earlier, tougher neutrality laws preventing the U.S. from getting any material to the Allies. Then, as the rest of the world looked on in shock, the Germans (having already disposed of Poland and Belgium) knocked France completely out of the war in June of 1940. Realizing that Britain stood alone against the Nazis in Europe, under Roosevelt's leadership U. S. "neutrality" became "measures short of war." Just after the fall of France, Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill signed an agreement to lease British naval bases in the Caribbean to the U.S. in exchange for fifty older American naval destroyers in the so-called "bases for destroyers deal." Early the following year (1941) FDR managed to get appropriations through the Congress for a "Lend-lease" program to funnel war supplies to the British. In June, 1941, the Germans made the unwise decision to attack the Soviet Union, thus bringing the Red Army into the war against Hitler. Thereafter, both the British and Russian war efforts benefited from America's "Lend-lease" assistance. A few weeks after Germany widened the war to include the Russians, Roosevelt and Churchill met and signed the Atlantic Charter, a most remarkable step for a "neutral" nation. The Charter outlined America's overall attachment to the ideal of self-determination and freedom but more pointedly declared that the "disarmament of [aggressor] nations is essential." The leaders signed the Charter in August, the same month that a poll showed that less than twenty percent of the American people supported entering the war. Yet, more telling, that same month nearly seventy percent reported being "willing to risk war with Japan" rather than allow the Japanese Pacific expansion continue unchecked. The Japanese High Command would provide the final decisive event with the surprise attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. Afterward, President Roosevelt led a determinedly unified people to war.