Historical Context: July, 1941

The Castle Theatre in Logansport, Louisiana booked the second Bing Crosby and Bob Hope “road picture” as a mid-week feature in July of 1941: Road to Zanzibar.

Meanwhile, Americans were cautiously watching events overseas. Five months later, Japan would attack Pearl Harbor.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered an Independence Day address on July 4, 1941, warning that “the United States will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship.”

On June 22, 1941, more than 3 million German troops invaded Russia in three parallel offensives, in what is the most powerful invasion force in history. Nineteen panzer divisions, 3,000 tanks, 2,500 aircraft, and 7,000 artillery pieces poured across a thousand-mile front as Hitler went to war on a second front.