On the roads to Rome, Berlin, and Tokyo, the Americans found themselves in control of key economic, population, and logistic nodes on three continents and two ocean basins. Between lend-lease deals and direct amphibious assaults, they now held all meaningful launching pads for attacks between the Western and Eastern Hemispheres. Combined with their massive wartime navy, the Americans had quite inadvertently become the determining factor in issues European and Asian, financial and agricultural, industrial and trade based, cultural and military.
