> You are right about our unpreparedness for WWII,
> and this nation was gratefully not very
> militarized until really after 1945, and
> especially after the Soviets attained the atomic
> bomb. We have been on a war footing ever since,
> and this is why Eisenhower so urged us not to be
> dominated by the military-industrial complex. He
> was not heeded, and 43 years later we gave
> billions of tax dollars to a Wyoming oil man to
> destabilize the Middle East even further, than the
> British had in WWI.

The government saw the writing on the wall... They folded the U.S. Lighthouse Service into the Coast Guard in 1939 to militarize it. (buoy tenders being very versitile ships)By the spring of 1941, several months before Pearl Harbor, the Coast Guard was conducting patrols off Greenland, and actually captured a Norwegian sealer (Norway had already invaded by Germany)serving as a nazi radio station in the fall of 1941, and later a nazi weather station on land.