To say that this was a wake-up call to the rest of the world, (and most especially to us) was a massive understatement. Hitler routed Poland's army in about two weeks. What we did have was a force very similar to Poland's, in terms of size, and reliance on horse cavalry, with very little in the way of mechanized forces of any kind. There were tentative budgetary plans to allocate $7 Mil for additional infantry tanks, but we had no tanks in large-scale production. Other than obsolete WWI tanks, our total American tank inventory amounted to 240 machine-gun armed M1 and M2 light tanks, plus a single (1) medium tank prototype, armed with a 37mm gun. You could safely say that we were asleep at the switch. In fact, I remember seeing newsreels at the movies showing tanks being dumped in the ocean, after the war. For all practical purposes, our Armored Force had long since been dead and buried. There may have been a few tanks still around from WWI, but most of them were in military museums and displays. It's hard to imagine that the Armored Force of the USA was virtually non-existent at the same moment that Hitler started his Blitzkrieg attacks in Europe.
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