Читать книгу Is Tomorrow Hitler's? 200 Questions on the Battle of Mankind - H. R. Knickerbocker - Страница 4

Table of Contents

There is no such thing as winning a fight without passion. France went to war apologetically; France fought the war without music, and so France lost. Britain went to war apologetically, but Britain had the inestimable advantage of being bombed, and today for the first time in 100 years Britain is angry and is fighting as she has never fought before. We, the United States, are today apologetic, so sorry that it seems we after all are called upon to fight, and some of us still say we should not fight, and others say we must fight only with aviators and sailors, and never with infantrymen, and very few indeed are the strains of martial music throughout the land. From all sides we are called upon to restrain our emotions, and it is said that the cool head is the shrewd head, and that is correct, of course, but a cool head without a hot heart is useless on a battlefield. Without anger there can be no victory and useful anger is based upon understanding. Unless the American people can be brought to understand that our national existence and our individual security are today in peril, and unless the American people become angry at the enemy, we shall become a part of Hitler’s Reich.

History may eventually record that Britain was saved by the bombs Hitler has rained upon her since the fall of France. Unless they annihilate the British, these bombs will have fulfilled a function Hitler never imagined. He thought they would terrorize the British into surrender; instead the bombs aroused a resistance such as no other population has ever shown, for the prolonged punishment of Britain’s cities has been worse than anything we know of elsewhere, including Belgrade, Warsaw, Rotterdam, Madrid, Barcelona, or Chungking. The British required this experience to awaken them. They had been at war eight months when the Germans finally attacked in the West, but they had not given up the grand old British custom of the Friday to Tuesday week end. It took the German break-through on the Meuse, and then the German bombs on London, to shock every inhabitant of the British Isles into the realization that they faced death for their nation and death or slavery for themselves unless they fought with a ferocity even greater than that of their jungle enemies.

We are today as sound asleep as the British were before May 1940. We are as sound asleep as the French were before they saw their fortifications fall and their army of 4,500,000 soldiers with the tradition of Napoleon dissolve between May 10 and June 17, in five weeks of the greatest military debacle of all time. We have had no bombs on America, and presumably shall not have them until it is time to trek for the Rocky Mountains. A sober American patriot remarked, “How fortunate Britain has been to have had the bombs to arouse her martial spirit before it was too late. If Hitler were to have a lapse in judgment and send just half a dozen bombers over New York, and drop just half a dozen bombs, it might be the salvation of America.” But Hitler will do no such thing. He is glad to accommodate those Americans who refuse to believe they are threatened until they are physically attacked. When and if the Germans break through upon America we shall awake to find ourselves alone, cut off, surrounded, outnumbered, outgunned, and outlawed amid a world of enemies.

A few of us, chiefly correspondents formerly in Germany, have been trying to do duty for German bombs on America, and for the German break-through. We have been called alarmists. For years the world of international observers was divided into two groups: the one composed of nearly everybody on earth outside of Germany, who understood nothing of the true character of Hitler’s Third Reich; and the second tiny group, small enough to be contained within a lecture hall, composed of correspondents, diplomats, and a few businessmen who had firsthand knowledge of what the Nazis mean. Today a good many persons without this intimate knowledge of Nazi Germany have been able to decide for themselves about the character of a regime which has overrun fifteen countries in three years, but the danger to America still looks very remote and impersonal to millions of patriotic citizens. I have been talking to about 100,000 of these citizens, during a lecture series.

My thesis was in brief: That the United States should be in a state of formal, shooting war with Germany as speedily as possible because only by this means can we make the world safe for America; and that we must realize that after going to war we have only begun a task which may last for many years and one which we can fulfill only by learning to fight with even more fervor than the demoniac Nazi shock troops, and by greater national self-sacrifice than we have ever been called upon to make.

On this thesis I was asked around 3,000 questions during the question period following the lectures. For this book I have chosen around 200 as representative of what the American people are thinking. I have arranged the questions in categories and have added many recent ones to bring the Forum up to date. Eager, painful, almost agonizing concern for the future of America was the background of these queries from audiences in 128 communities, including two-thirds of all cities of more than 100,000 population and scores of towns and villages. The people with whom I talked ranged from millionaire winter tourists in Florida to coal miners in Pennsylvania, applegrowers in Yakima, oilmen in Oklahoma, college boys in the Great Lakes states, farmers in the Midwest, workers, bankers, club ladies, teachers, cowhands, Catholics, Jews, Protestants, atheists, Yankees, Southerners, Texans, Westerners—Americans.

I am convinced that these earnest Americans, representing through their family and friendly connections at least ten times their number, or more than 1,000,000 persons, are far in advance of the President’s moves toward active defense, just as the President has always been far ahead of the Congress. They wanted action even before the President offered it. Among 3,000 questioners there were not more than six openly hostile hecklers from the floor. Would it be too hopeful to say that America is 2,994 to 6 in favor of liberty?