When the United States joined the Second World War in December 1941, it did so with racially segregated armed forces. Ubiquitous, cruelly irrational discrimination against non-white soldiers was legal and largely taken for granted. Little of this had changed by the time the United States led the Allies to victory in 1945. It began to change only in 1948, when President Truman ordered the desegregation of the US Navy.

Therefore, if Hitler had only postponed his attack on Poland, and if the Japanese had only postponed theirs on Pearl Harbor, for a decade or so, the Allies would have been able to field armies incomparably more worthy to take up a fight against racist tyranny.

Of course, by then they would have been facing nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles.

In the event, the enemy was not so prudent, and in 1941, Americans did not have the option to wait until they themselves were without sin before going to war. Though there were appeasers and pacifists and outright enemies among them who urged further phoney peace initiatives and concessions, the Second World War was not an elective war any more than the present war is. The West had already waited far too long. Fifty million lives too long, as it turned out. A blighted generation too long. A Holocaust too long...