Tag Archives: war

Looming War Clouds

H.L. Mencken

Springfield News-Leader/February 24, 1929

I

Those who read the newspapers attentively have no doubt noticed of late a great efflorescence of articles on the possibility (or probability) of war between the United States and England. Such articles began to appear in England three or four years ago, usually in the form of violent denunciations of the Yankee Shylock. For a while there was no response from this side, but now the matter begins to be discussed very widely, here as well as in England, and some of the Liberal weeklies have got into a powerful sweat about it, and are demanding that all good men come to the aid of peace.

How much sense is there in this pother? In my judgment, not much. That the English dislike us intensely. I grant you freely, and that they dream of a day when they’ll be able to pull us down, loot our strongbox and regain their old primacy in the world—that may be granted also. But they are a realistic people, and the plain facts do not escape them. Those facts are numerous and complicated, but they may be precipitated into the bald proposition that beating the United States, at the present writing, is a sheer physical impossibility. It simply can’t be done.

That England couldn’t do it alone is admitted by everyone, including even Englishmen. That she couldn’t do it with the usual allies is less obvious, but none the less true. Two things make it so. One is the extraordinary capacity of the United States for long and desperate defense—the vast advantage that lies in our peculiar geographical situation and our economic invulnerability. The other lies in our accompanying capacity to inflict endless and irreparable injury upon British trade and the whole British imperial system. Within six months after such a war started England would suffer greater loss than she suffered in the World War, and most of it would be loss that she could never make up.

II

As everyone knows, the English never tackle a first-rate foe without the aid of great hordes of allies. Their skill at rounding up such allies, in fact, is two-thirds of their skill at war, and they have seldom, in history, launched their actual attack without making sure of odds of at least two to one in their favor. Where would they get help today? From Japan? Perhaps. But where in Europe? 

Where would the cannon-fodder come from for a long war? And where the needed aid, in ships and men, on the sea?

It seems to me highly unlikely that they’re able to do any effective business on the continent. The French, true enough, now incline to them more or less, but the instant the French took any chances the Italians would probably be upon them, not to mention the Germans. It is almost impossible to imagine the Germans helping France and England against the United States. They would have too much to gain by remaining out of it—too much to gain, in the wiping out of their war debt, after France and England had been beaten. The United States could well afford to offer them anything they wanted in that direction. What’s more, it could undoubtedly deliver what it promised—if they stayed out, and so kept France nervous and ineffective.

The Russians would keep out of an Anglo-American war, if only because they couldn’t make up their minds which side they hated the more. Moreover, their help would be of little value if they came in; even in the World War, once the battle of Tannenberg had been fought, they were a liability to the allies rather than an asset. This leaves the smaller countries—Holland, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Belgium. All of them save one stuck to neutrality in the World War, and that one was horribly mauled. Is it possible to imagine them coming into a war that might last twice as long, and be five times as costly? I think not.

III

There remains Japan. That godless and immoral country has long served as a bugaboo for timid Americans, but there is every reason for believing that its prowess has been vastly overrated. Only twice in their history have the Japs ever faced civilized foes, and both times they made frightful exhibitions of themselves, though in each case they won. The first time was in 1904, when the enemy was Russia. The Russians were 7,000 miles from their base, and had only a single-track railroad to bring up supplies; the Japs were but a few hundred miles from their base and had the open sea behind them. Yet it took them more than a year to capture Mukden, and when the job was done at last they were so exhausted that the ensuing peace treaty ran in Russia’s favor almost as much as it ran in their own.

Their second venture against white men was in the autumn of 1914. The job before them then was to capture Tsingtao, on the Chinese coast. It was defended on the sea by a few small boats, most of them converted merchantmen, and on the land by a few thousand men, mainly middle-aged territorials. Against this puny force of Germans the Japs brought up a fleet of cruisers and battleships and a whole division. Yet it took them three months to take the town, and they did so even then only because the Germans had run out of ammunition.

The siege was marked by almost unbelievable grotesquerie. Half a dozen Germans put out of from the port in a small motor boat, fastened a mine to a pile of Japanese cruisers, and blew it up. On the third side small parties beat off the attack of whole Japanese regiments. When, in the end, the town was taken by assault, the Jap soldiers were so exhausted that they fell in their tracks, and many of them had to be carried to hospitals by their defeated enemies. The march-in was marked by a painful episode. A small force of British that had come up refused to salute the Japanese flag! No wonder!

IV

The prowess of the Japs has been persistently exaggerated by American advocates of a large navy. It has served to scare silly opponents, and so get them what they wanted. But it has very little reality. There is not the slightest reason for believing that a Japanese fleet, meeting an American fleet of anything like its strength, could beat it. Or that the Japs, beating a weaker fleet, could land and maintain an army on the Pacific coast.

True enough, it might be easy for them, joining England against us, to seize the Philippines. But could they hold them? It seems highly improbable in the long run we’d be able to dislodge them, and to punish them dreadfully in the process. Moreover, we’d have complete control of Canada three months after the war started, and there would be no way for England to run us out. In the end we could take the Philippines back as a very small return for getting out, or for getting out of one province, or even one city.

For all these reasons—and there are many more—it seems to me highly improbable that the English are seriously contemplating making war on the United States. The French, in their position, might think of it, but the French are full of folly, but the English are very cautions and calculating, especially in war. When the odds are plainly against them, they are for peace. It would be impossible to imagine them taking such chances as the Germans took in 1914. Such gambling in the grand manner is simply not in their nature. They play close to the board.

Why, then, do they rattle the sword now? Why are their papers full of dark hints? Mainly, I believe, because they know how easy it is to scare Americans. They want to keep their control of the sea. They want to make it appear that challenging that control will be very dangerous, not to say fatal. So they talk lugubriously of the war ahead, and their dupes and sycophants on this side of the ocean swallow it all with sad faces. Their aim is to make it appear that any step the United States may take for its proper defense is an act of wanton aggression, almost an act of open war. That aim is beautifully supported by the pacifists and the Anglomaniacs —not infrequently the same persons.

So far, congress refuses to succumb. It has passed the cruiser bill. If it continues along that line there will be no easy Anglo-American war. There will never be such a war so long as the United States can put up a dangerous resistance. It will come when we are weak, and not before.

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Postwar Steps to Communism

Westbrook Pegler

Enid Morning News/January 1, 1943

NEW YORK. Dec. 31.-As the American people yield their liberties to their government, the better to fight the dictators and the sooner to win the war with the least possible loss of American lives, that government becomes daily more impatient toward the very freedom which the Fourth of July orators used to refer to as the sacred heritage. Henry Wallace, the vice-president, has spoken slightingly of the Bill of Rights and now he proposes that after this war, when Soviet dictatorship will overrun the European continent, the United States and her allies supervise or inspect the school systems of the enemy countries “to undo, as far as possible, the diabolical work of Hitler and the Japanese war lords in poisoning the minds of the young.”

Mr. Wallace, who detests dictatorship in the enemy nations, rather admires the Russian dictatorship, not merely as a military ally, but also as a method of government, and as he continues to call for cooperation and mutuality all over the world after the war, he offers no valid assurance that the realistic Stalin and his helpers will desist from spreading communism in Europe. Stalin, himself, has given no such commitment and it would be worthless, in the light of our own experience in the United States, if he should.

Although Soviet Russia gave solemn promise to quit interfering in the domestic affairs of this nation in the treaty of recognition negotiated early in the new deal, that interference has continued down to present hour under the auspices of, and through the members of the Communist party, which has been denounced as an alien, anti-American influence by Attorney General Biddle and whose subservience to the Kremlin was frankly if incautiously recognized a few weeks ago by Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. Many tireless anti-Americans were present in the gathering before which Mr. Wallace disparaged the bill of rights.

This must mean only that the children of Europe, the next generation of fighters, will be taught Communism, including atheism, under the supervision or inspection of the guardian nations and that, as in Russia, and, indeed as in Germany and Italy today, the European people will exist for the state and the dictator’s purposes. That may be the inevitable next step but it is not necessary, nor is it assured that the people of the United States will agree to take a hand, even passively, in the inculcation of one poisonous philosophy to destroy another and, in effect, identical philosophy.

The alternative would seem to be for the United States to withdraw in isolation and armed preparedness to wait out the future. Mrs. Roosevelt recently expressed dissatisfaction with that freedom of Americans which permits a young man to become a doctor because he wants to, and to locate regardless of the community needs. This has the sound of something from the Communist arguments from Mein Kampf.

If Americans, through their government, are to supervise or inspect the teaching of the next generation of Europeans and of Japanese, and unpoison their minds, would Mr. Wallace do less than that for his own people? It seems very unlikely and unlike him and in considering this probability one must consider, too, that his idea of intellectual poison might conflict with the inherent American idea.

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For American Communists, What Victory Will Bring

Westbrook Pegler

Enid Morning News/January 24, 1943

NEW YORK, Jan. 22.—Memory is short and most Americans seem to forget the aggressive campaign of the communists and their fellow travelers to cripple the United States during the life of the so-called non-aggression pact between Russia and Nazi Germany, the document which touched off this war, which terminated on June 22, 1941, when Hitler attacked Russia. Like the Nazis in our midst, the communists insisted that war was not, and could not become, the legitimate business of the United States. The communists and the Nazis however, had a common purpose to prevent the creation of military strength here. The sincere American noninterventionists on the other hand wanted to arm the country and train armies but hoped to be able to sit this one out.

On August 31, 1939, V. M. Molotov, the Russian commissar of foreign affairs, in a speech to the supreme soviet, published in pamphlet form for American distribution by the workers library of New York, said: “The nonaggression pact marks a turning point in the history of Europe and not only of Europe. Only yesterday, the German fascists were pursuing a foreign policy hostile to us. Yes, only yesterday we were enemies in the sphere of foreign relations. Today, however, the situation has changed and we are enemies no longer.

“The pact puts an end to the enmity between Germany and the USSR. The fact that our outlooks and political systems differ must not and cannot be obstacles to the establishment of good political relations. Only enemies of Germany and the USSR can strive to create enmity between the peoples of these countries.”

It will be seen that the detestation of fascism per se, and the furious determination to stamp it out because it is evil, was lacking in those days. Russia was willing to live and let fascism live as good neighbors. It was only when Hitler repudiated the pact and attacked that fascism suddenly became an intolerable evil of itself.

On November 13, 1939, Earl Browder, the general secretary of the American communist party and leader of the enormous conspiracy against this nation’s rearmament and military training program, made a speech in Madison Square Garden in which he said: “We communists clearly and boldly denounce the present war as an imperialistic one, on both sides, from which the people have nothing to gain but misery, starvation, oppression and death. We warn that the peoples who suffer from this war will not be patient but will prepare to take the decision into their own hands if our present ‘statesmen’ do not stop the war. We point out that in Europe this means that the war can have only the effect of placing the socialist revolution on the order of business as a practical question.”

Browder was not then as strongly opposed to fascism as an evil as to approve a war to obliterate it. Some American editors and statesmen lately have flinched from the possibility that communism may succeed fascism, from which it is indistinguishable, on continental Europe and mention of this possibility is deplored and even suppressed.

Yet on the word of the boss communist of the United States, the socialist revolution is now on the order of business in Europe. In another document issued by the New York communist publishing house in February, 1940, entitled “I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier for Wall Street,” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote: “The best insurance to keep off the toboggan slide into war is an ultimatum to our government: ‘stay neutral; not a dollar for war.’ Starve the war; feed America first! We must hurry. Already President Roosevelt has started along the road that led Woodrow Wilson to war.”

The rest of the pamphlet is in the same vein and if these and many other documents of the same kind were published then had any effect at all, it was to retard the arming and training of the American fighters from whom a great cry was sent be up by the communists last summer however, when they were demanding to a second front in Europe, and to impair the production of weapons, planes and machines which the same communists now demand in unlimited and miraculous abundance for Russia, The lesson taught by this literature is that Russia’s war is a nationalistic fight for life, not a gallant defense of the freedom which fascism, like communism, strives to annihilate; that Russia does contemplate a communistic revolution in Europe when it is won and that the relationship between the United States and Russia is not one of political comradeship but of military alliance in a war against a common enemy of two distinct nations.

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Roulette with Destiny

Dorothy Thompson

Indianapolis Star/January 20, 1940

THE ACTION of the United States Congress in the matter of the loan to Finland is simply incredible. In one of the most critical moments of history Congress has chosen to behave with supreme frivolity. in a moment when every small neutral in Europe is trembling in fear of an extension of undeclared war; when all Scandinavia fears a breakthrough of the Russian armies, and when Holland and Belgium fear an assault from Germany, the world’s greatest neutral has slapped Finland’s face in the most ostentatious way and in view of the whole earth.

Finland would never have applied for a loan had there been the slightest indication that it would be refused. The refusal is a staggering political blow. It is the greatest bloodless victory that Stalin has had thus far. It is, at the same time, aid and assistance to the most immoderate forces in Germany. The moderates have been trying to stay Hitler’s hand by telling him that another aggression against a neutral state would outrage all neutral countries, particularly the great United States.

Now the Congress has given notice that our outrage will only be expressed in sending a handsome wreath to the funeral, bearing the inscription, “He was an upright man and paid his debts.”

We will collect money from individuals to feed the innocent neutral victims of the Russian or German steam roller. Millions for bandages and food, but not 1 cent for a gun with which to defend yourself.

Save your money, friends. Dead men don’t eat.

We must bring ourselves to realize that every action taken by the United States government today has positive diplomatic and political effects, outside and inside the United States.

The international effect of Congress’s refusal to distinguish between declared wars among great powers and undeclared assaults on neutrals is to strengthen revolutionary gangsterism all over the world outside this country and inside it as well.

The Communist Daily Worker, the mouthpiece of the Soviet government, published right in New York and distributed to American workers, is jubilant this morning.

Does the American Congress not know that the very subversive elements for the investigation, of which Congress has already given millions to the Dies committee, are all rejoicing today?

The essential propaganda of the Christian Front and the Communist party and the German-American Bund, whose leaders are at this moment under indictment or already condemned for fraud or planned violence, is that there are war-mongering profiteers.

It is no concern of ours, according to them, whether Finland, Sweden, Norway, Holland, Switzerland, the  solid, solvent nations embodying as deep a Western culture as exists—are cynically erased off the map tomorrow.

For in the welter of destruction and despair that will follow such collapse the gangster with the gun will be the sole rallying point. Meanwhile, in the United States, a bland and complacent feeling of security and isolation will have been created. The distinctions between right and wrong, between aggression and defense, between civilization and barbarism, will have been broken down. “If we lend money to the Finns we shall be dragged into war,” must be put alongside Earl Browder’s statement before the Dies committee that he would try to make a civil war in the United States if this country were ever in hostilities with the Soviet Union.

Does not the Congress see the connections between these things?

And where is the consistency in our policy? We refuse to recognize territorial changes brought about by force. We do not recognize Manchukuo or the Bohemian-Moravian state carved by Germany out of Czecho-Slovakia. We stand for the sanctity of treaties and the rule of international law. We have exacted from the nations of the world a solemn pledge not to resort to war as an instrument of national policy. We have lent money to China and refused to apply the neutrality act in the Far East. We have in all our words stood for order and recognition of law.

But if we turn down the loan to Finland we shall stand for international anarchy and hope that, by repressive measures at home, we can stop it from spreading here—while we give notice to the world that the United States is scared.

But this time I think Congress has made a mistake. It is wrong in gauging public opinion. The American people want to send substantial help to Finland with the object of helping Finland and all the other neutrals resist invasion. Conversation with any man you speak to in the street shows it. The people have a far better instinct than Congress has. They know that the earth is round and that if this anarchy spreads we shall suffer.

The behavior of Congress indicates, however, that the nation is at present without leadership and without policy. The party leadership has collapsed. The Republicans are not following anyone, and neither are the Democrats. There is no direction in foreign policy. Congress is not accepting the views of the Department of State. We are not, in short, being governed or being allowed to govern ourselves.

What happens from day to day depends upon how senators and congressmen have laid their bets on the political roulette wheels. This preposterous irresponsibility sows confusion abroad, breaks down the confidence of this nation and leaves us open to intermittent and inexplicable waves of fear.

This is unfortunate. We are not behaving like ourselves.

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