Where did you get the idea that it was?

Like I said it's something that's impossible to prove.

the Congress they wanted and Congress didn’t declare war. The situation today is completely different.

of years off WWII. A shorter global war would have meant fewer people would have died worldwide.

But more AMERICANS surely would have died under that scenario. And that's why we didn't, why isolationism was our choice for a good spell.

Our most self-interested delay of all was, after entering the war, not attempting to liberate France for years... not opening a Western front against against Hitler.

Dec 1941 we were in the war. We held off on Normandy until June 1944... that's a long time.

But during that long span Britain at least was safe. Meanwhile we were heavily committed in the Pacific.

And most fortuitously of all, Germany and Russia were beating the holy hell out of each other on the opposite side of Europe. The battles of Moscow and Stalingrad were the two bloodiest battles Planet Earth has ever seen. The German-Russian part of WWII was the single biggest conflict in human history. Over 50 million people died in WWII, and Russians alone made up more than 20 million of them.

It was the Russians who reversed the tide of WWII in Europe. Not us. We held off on our big push against Hitler from the West until after Russia suffered their unimaginable losses and in doing so first put the Nazis on the run.

Stalin was as bad a fucking monster as Hitler, I'm no admirer of the former Soviet Union. But we absolutely could have saved several million Russian lives (and at least 2 or 3 million Jewish lives from death camps in Germany and Poland), and thereby significantly reduced the total tally of dead from WWII, had we not delayed like we did, both in first entering the war, and then in opening a Western front in Europe.

Thing was, tho, those were Russians dying to reverse the course of the war in Europe. So, to spare American lives, we weren't in a big hurry. Those were self-interested decisions. But I don't feel in a position to significantly question them; I'll leave it at just understanding them.

Churchill implored us for over a year to enter the war and rescue England. That was an existential plea from the Mother Country itself, but Roosevelt's answer pre-Pearl Harbor had to be, Sorry, politically, I just can't do it. We can supply you, but I can't send American soldiers. We're all rooting for your RAF against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, though!

After Hitler decided he wanted more than Poland in the East and flipped on his "ally' the Soviet Union, Stalin, suddenly OUR ally instead, implored FDR for years, plural, to open a Western front and save Russia from the decimation it was suffering at the hands of what was clearly the best military to ever exist. Suffering that Russia was doing all alone. No nation in history has ever lost as high a proportion of its population in a war as Russia did in WWII. (Well, maybe North Korea 1951-1953 when Curtis LeMay leveled every city in the country. We'll say no major nation has.)

Roosevelt replied, Sorry Joe. Later... I promise! For now, we can help you with war materiel. Keep killing those krauts!

American Jews, aware of the Holocast that was going on, strived mightily to educate FDR about it and get America heavily into the fight against Germany from the West. Roosevelt wasn't particularly Jew-friendly and largely ignored them. Later we'd claim we had no idea what was going on in the camps.

America was vitally important in achieving Victory In Europe, obviously. But for domestic consumption we've always spiffed up our roles a bit... as any nation does. War is the ugliest business on earth, and going about it with a certain ruthlessness usually does work better for one's side than does nobility. My own father was in that war but managed to not die in it. I got to be conceived a decade afterwards as a result and I now selfishly regard that as a good thing. Like Patton said, in war the idea is to get the OTHER GUY to die for HIS country. This America not infrequently has done. And I don't feel in a position to complain about it.

No comparison whatsoever.