THEY'RE BOMBING LONDON. It’s the big news all over the radio this morning -- apparently the Luftwaffe has hit London proper for the first time in this war, in a night raid which caused an undetermined amount of damage. A report on N.B.C. says the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral was lit up by a nearby fire from a bomb, "indicating it was near the heart of London." The raiders were also described as appearing "frequently but not in great numbers," and penetrated the city’s air defenses after flying at such a height they couldn’t be seen from the ground. N.B.C. also quotes a British radio commentator as calling it "the first real air raid we have had."
(Actually, there have been six raids in the greater London area in the last week and a half, but those affected suburban areas around the Thames, the docks of the East End, and the southwestern suburbs. The press has carelessly referred to some of these as "London’s first air raid." For instance, a previous raid which struck hard at the fashionable West End was described by the Associated Press on Friday as "London’s first night raid of the war.")
More significant from a military standpoint, this morning’s broadcasts say, were Nazi mass raids in Wales, in parts of the Midlands, and on Dover, Ramsgate, other locations in southeast England. The Germans used 800 bombers and fighter planes in a daylight raid on the Portsmouth naval base, according to the B.B.C.
A TOUGH WARNING TO "FIERY" JAPAN. A United Press report Saturday says that the U.S. State Department has given "a new and drastic warning to Japan that a time of reckoning must come if Japan persists in her present course" of continued aggression in East Asia and violation of American rights in China. The U.P. adds the language of the document, addressed to Foreign Minister Matsuoka, "was extremely blunt, and the most vigorous the State Department has used in all the series of communications it has sent to Tokio during the last three years." And, in the meantime, the increasingly-Fascist Japanese government has begun purging men from its diplomatic corp who are accused of being conciliatory towards America and Britain. The New York Herald Tribune comments Saturday on the purge --
"In a discussion of his extremely unceremonial notice to forty career Japanese diplomats to get out of Japan’s way, the new Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Chashi, said, according to a press quotation, that the only way to usher in the new era for Japan was to abolish formalities, and continued: ‘I am to weld the Japanese race into a rolling ball of fire, carrying everything before it.’ If career diplomats are not constitutionally qualified to function as balls of fire, he suggested, he would replace them with those who could. This is a forceful reminder of the havoc which Hitler’s rise to power played with German diplomatic service in 1933, and [suggests] that the published list of those unsuited to be fireballs is a short preliminary list only."
ROOSEVELT TELLS CONGRESS TO HURRY UP. Finally, President Roosevelt has gone beyond a general endorsement of conscription and said just what type of plan the Congress needs to pass -- and how quickly they need to do it. According to Joseph Driscoll in the New York Herald Tribune, the President said at Friday’s press conference that Congress ought to act on the Burke-Wadsworth compulsory military training bill, which was introduced in both the House and Senate on June 20. Significantly, he also declared himself firmly opposed to compromise proposals which would postpone the effective date of conscription to January 1, to see if voluntary enlistments prior to that date could gain the Army enough men to meet the goals of the unprecedented peace-time buildup. He said the postponement would cause a year’s delay in meeting the Army’s manpower goals, which are to have 1,200,000 trained men under arms by the autumn of 1941.
It’s about time Congress got a nudge on this, although the President himself has contributed to the delay by treating the conscription issue so cautiously up till now. At least there is some good news in this respect -- the House and Senate did pass the Administration’s bill to call up 360,000 National Guardsmen and Army reservists for a year’s active duty defending the Western Hemisphere and America’s overseas possessions generally. Charles Hurd’s report in the New York Times cites the President as estimating that 800,000 men will be "needed immediately" in addition to the numbers available in the National Guard, the Reserves, and among those now on active duty.
CUCKOO ISOLATIONIST GRANDSTANDING. There’s been a lot of bonehead thinking on display in Congress during the debate on the Burke-Wadsworth bill. In Saturday’s Chicago Tribune Chesly Manly summarizes, admiringly no doubt, the arguments of Senator Bulow, Democrat of South Dakota, one of the leading opponents of conscription --
"Senator Bulow declared that too many people have forgotten that the Monroe doctrine is a two way street, and that the traffic coming and going is equally important. Too many Americans, he said, want a Monroe doctrine for this hemisphere, but insist on running affairs in Europe and Asia at the same time....If the people of Germany want a dictator, let them have a dictator, and if they want to fight, let them fight, so long as they don’t bother us, Bulow urged. He insisted that we will not be attacked if we mind our own business and let Europe alone. ‘Maybe three horsemen have started to ride -- Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini,’ Bulow said. ‘Maybe that’s true, but let us make sure that the fourth horseman shall not be a President of the United States. That is what we are coming to if we pass this bill. I am glad my father came to this country to escape militarism and despotism, the same thing this bill would impose upon my descendants.’"
Where to begin? First, after witnessing the fate of Finland, the Baltic States, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, etc., you’d think the philosophy of "we will not be attacked if we mind our own business" would be thoroughly discredited by now in the eyes of anyone but the dimmest of clods. Second, Senator Bulow’s argument that conscription would lead to a dangerous round of U.S. military adventurism flatly contradicts the isolationist charge, which Bulow himself has made, that the Administration has made a complete hash of rearmament and therefore the American army is incapable of mounting a proper defense. Third, the screwball logic of isolationism equates the aggression of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini with attempts by the U.S., Britain, and others to defend free peoples against aggression. And isn’t it strange that congressional isolationists, while pungently denouncing the Preisdent for his support of conscription, haven’t a word to say about Wendell Willkie even though he’s endorsed it as well?
NO PRESS BIAS HERE. The following paragraph is from an unbylined news story which ran in Friday’s Chicago Tribune, concering a speech made by Senator Pepper, Democrat of Florida --
"Senator Pepper, a cup bearer for the New Deal, is the author of a seven point program to establish a dictatorship in this country. It has been charged in the senate that he would vest in President Roosevelt the powers of a Genghis Khan or a Nero."
The story, by the way, claims the Senator "paid a fulsome tribute on the floor of the senate today to the greatness and genius of Adolf Hitler." Other newspapers somehow missed this stunning development.
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