SIX BRITISH PLANES REPEL EIGHTY NAZI RAIDERS. Lord Halifax soundly rejected Hitler's "last appeal to reason" in a radio speech last night, but perhaps a more fitting answer to the Fuehrer came over the English Channel this past week-end. According to the Associated Press account, six British Hurricane fighters attacked -- yes, attacked -- a fleet of eighty German warplanes Sunday afternoon and safely made it back home. The A.P. says the British planes shot down a Messerschmitt fighter and drilled holes in "many" of the others. More importantly, the British attack appears to have thwarted a bomber raid on a British merchant convoy sailing in the Channel.
James MacDonald writes in Monday's New York Times that the Luftwaffe has so far been unsuccessful in its attempt to close the Channel to shipping. What’s more, British planes on Monday bombarded "Nazi naval bases at Wilhelmshaven and Emden, oil refineries at Hamburg and...factories in the Ruhr and air bases in the Netherlands and Belgium."
The battle might not begin in earnest for a while, but stories like this offer hope that when it comes, the British military will give as good as they get.
IN MEMORIAM -- THE BALTIC STATES. Once again, some small, peaceful European countries are brutally seized by a big neighbor. This time, once again, the perpetrator is Russia, and the victims are Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. This round of aggression came in stages. The first came last month with one-party elections of new parliaments in all three countries, in which voters were ordered to "elect" candidates loyal to Stalin. According to Donald Day in the Chicago Tribune, the puppet parliaments met Sunday "in halls plastered with portraits of Stalin and draped with red flags. They followed identical procedure...At 3 p.m. they gave great shouts in favor of the petitions for union with Russia." And so, 5,500,000 more people have passed into totalitarian dictatorship.
And, according to the Associated Press, the Rumanians have been given a Russian diplomatic note urging King Carol to form a "popular," i.e., pro-communist, government. So another conquest may be in the offing, unless Hitler finds it expedient to stick up for his "rights" to dictate to Rumania.
BRITAIN IS THE WORLD’S "STABILIZING FORCE." New York Herald Tribune columnist Dorothy Thompson offered a very nice tribute to the British Empire Sunday night in a radio talk from Montreal --
"This remarkable and artistic thing, the British Empire; part empire and part commonwealth, is the only world-wide organization in existence, the world equalizer and equilibrium, the only world-wide stabilizing force for law and order on the planet....If you bring it down, the planet will rock with an earthquake such as it has never known. We in the United States will shake with that earthquake, and so will Germany....Around you, Winston Churchill, is a gallant company of ghosts. Elizabeth is there, and sweetest Shakespeare. Drake is there, and Raleigh, and Wellington. Burke is there, and Walpole, and Pitt. Byron is there, and Wordsworth and Shelley. Yes, and I think Washington is there, and Hamilton, two men of English blood who gallant Englishmen defended in your Parliament. And Jefferson is there, who died again the other day in France. All the makers of a world of freedom and of law are there."
It was the first program in a new C.B.S. series. A partial transcription was included inside Monday's Herald Tribune.
THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE ON HITLER’S "PEACE SPEECH". The Chicago Tribune gets things only partly right in an editorial on Hitler's peace speech --
"A compilation of the Fuehrer’s broken promises and of his downright unconditional pledges coolly repudiated would require a yard of type. Maybe he also first deceives himself. The common sense to which he appeals must take a common sense view of the man who speaks. That is tragic, because if a trustworthy German chancellor spoke as Hitler speaks the world might muster a bit of hope that the common-sense peace could be arrived at by negotiations between responsible men....The only thing which can change the condition of continental Europe is a complete British victory, with the overthrow of Hitler and the scattering of the Nazis. If the British could win that victory they then would say how Europe is to be organized and who is to rule it. To escape such consequences Hitler must conquer Great Britain. He expects to do that in short order. Mr. Churchill speaks of a war of several years. A peace which avoided either the finality of Nazi destruction, or of the elimination of British influence in world affairs might leave the empire untouched, but its days in continental Europe would be over until there was another readjustment in another age."
Yet this is plainly the kind of peace that the isolationists are still pining for. After all, in their eyes a British victory would only give London the power to decide "how Europe is to be organized," and therefore would be no better than a Nazi triumph. The isolationist illogic here is magnificent -- while alluding to Hitler’s terrible crimes, the Tribune wishes that a less unethical Nazi front-man ruled the roost so that a compromise peace could be brokered that rewards German murder and aggression. Of course, if a "trustworthy German chancellor" were in charge, the Reich wouldn’t have been busy over the past two years destroying the independence of seven different countries, and threatening to annihilate an eighth -- and therefore peace proposals wouldn’t be needed in the first place.
NO THIRD-TERM "THREAT". Sunday's New York Times carries a fine essay by Henry Steele Commager, professor of history at Columbia University, on the third-term issue. Contrary to Mark Sullivan's worried column in the Washington Post the other day, Professor Commager believes our democracy is in no great danger, regardless of how this election turns out --
"Whether the third-term tradition can survive the dual threat of the world emergency and the immense popularity of President Roosevelt remains to be seen. Undoubtedly during the next four months the country will resound with cries of dictatorship and huzzas of democracy. Let us reassure ourselves on one point. No matter what the outcome of the campaign, the nation will survive. The retention of the third-term tradition will not destroy democracy; it will merely indicate what is the will of the people and register that will. Nor will breaking of the third-term tradition destroy the American Constitution or demoralize American character. It will merely give an opportunity to the present President to carry through his program."
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