I like Dr. Steve Turley on YouTube. Of late, I haven’t agreed with him on a lot of things but today I heard him say something that was absolutely right – it ain’t over.

He mentioned the Berlin Wall and Roe V Wade as changes no one ever thought would happen, except those fighting for those changes, of course. There are a host of others. The abolition of slavery was fought for from before the beginning of the Revolutionary War but not obtained for over one hundred years more. The overturn of Plessy v Ferguson was fought for from the day the decision was handed down but 58 years would pass before it happened. The battle for civil rights began before the end of the Civil War but it would not be achieved in law for over a century.

December 7, 1941 saw America’s entry into World War II. Below you’ll see a map of the extent of Axis power in 1942. Most of Europe had already fallen before the first Japanese carrier set sail for Hawaii. The Soviet Union had only joined the effort six months earlier and they weren’t doing so great. Great Britain was nearing defeat – probably not so near as the pessimists think but closer than was good for anyone’s comfort.

If you start a game of Risk in as bad a position as the United States entered World War II you’d better hope your opponent is an idiot. It would be hard to start from a worse position even if you tried. Then we got our nose bloodied by the stupid Vichy French in North Africa – great start. We lose half our battleships in Pearl Harbor and have the French go off on us in North Africa.

The astute will note that the French were supposed to be on our side. They did eventually come around – after we pounded them. Never start a war by fighting with your own side, even if it was their fault (French opinion probably differs). Seriously, the beginning of 1942 looked like America was TRYING to lose.

The war in the Pacific started just as badly from Pearl Harbor to Wake Island. The USS South Dakota blew out her electrical system firing her main guns and only survived because USS Washington was there to save her backside. She has a whole class of battleships named for her and this was how badly her first outing went. The list of things that went wrong for the US in both the European and Pacific theaters in just those first six months of 1942 is long and embarrassing.

Playing catch up in the middle of the largest conflict in human history is an extremely bad idea. But we’d ignored all European pleas for military assistance. We send lots of humanitarian aid and a few munitions on the sly, but no troops, no weapons, nothing that would entangle us in Europe’s war. That meant that we were way behind when we went to war on December 8, 1941.

The sensible thing to do would have been to take our ball and go home. Just let the Nazis and the Japanese have the rest of the world. We didn’t need it anyway.

To our parents, grandparents and great grandparents very great credit, they did the exact opposite. The deck was stacked. We were way behind. It looked totally hopeless.

So the Greatest Generation rolled up its collective sleeves and went to war anyway. The first six months were pretty sketchy. But we were fast learners and the most productive nation on Earth. Some went to war as soldiers; others as factory workers. My Mother worked for the War Department; my Uncle as an aircraft mechanic. Millions upon millions more worked in every conceivable way to help win what should have been an unwinnable war.

Battleships were refloated, repaired and sent into battle. Countless tons of materiel and weapons flooded from America into every ally we had, including the Soviet Union. Shells and bullets beyond number pumped out of American factories and into the armories of American, British, Australian, Chinese, Russian and other allied militaries. Lessons from early battles lost were employed to earn victories in both theaters of the war.

A war that had begun nearly a decade earlier. A war that appeared on a map to already be decided. A war America had so desperately tried to avoid was being won despite the odds, despite the setbacks and despite the difficulty.

For America, it began on December 7, 1941. For Europe it ended on May 8, 1945. For the world, it ended September 2, 1945.

The hardest war ever fought. The first war to be fought on a truly global scale. The war that we shouldn’t have won was won.

“If you think you are beaten, you are,
If you think you dare not, you don’t.
If you like to win, but you think you can’t,
It is almost certain you won’t.

If you think you’ll lose, you’re lost,
For out in the world we find,
Success begins with a fellow’s will.
It’s all in the state of mind.

If you think you are outclassed, you are,
You’ve got to think high to rise,
You’ve got to be sure of yourself before
You can ever win a prize.

Life’s battles don’t always go
To the stronger or faster man.
But soon or late the man who wins,
Is the man who thinks he can.”

That poem, Thinking by Walter Wintle, is as true now as the day he put pen to paper. Defeat isn’t in the odds. Defeat is in how we fail to face those odds.

Or as the little engine put it, “I think I can, I think I can.”