In early February of 1941, following the fall of France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium to Hitler’s marauding armies, as young (average age 20) British spitfire and hurricane fighter pilots continued to drive Luftwaffe bombers from the skies over London and other U.K. cities, and as Hitler’s armies ravished what remained of free Europe, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent British Prime Minister Winston Churchill a poem by Longfellow which Roosevelt said: “applies to you people as it does to us.” The verse: “…Sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, with all the hopes of future years, is hanging breathless on thy fate.”