In 1939, on the eve...

...of World War II, the U. S. Army was only the 17th-largest in the world, sandwiched between such powers as Portugal and Bulgaria. According to Those Angry Days, only about a third of its 175,000 men (larger than the city of Naperville, Illinois but smaller than Aurora), had ever trained with a weapon. And the few weapons the Army had were almost all of World War I vintage.