U.S. READY TO SEND SHIPS TO THE BRITISH. Although shoved into the background by the "hot" warfare raging in southern Albania, Hitler’s campaign against Britain continues, on sea and well as in the air. Germany’s claim that her U-boats torpedoed and sank eighteen British merchant vessels in a single day spotlights the importance of a Roosevelt Administration plan to release thousands of tons of merchant shipping to the British. This new round of sales might total more than 100 ships, according to George Bookman in Wednesday’s Washington Post. He reports the idea was discussed at a closed meeting of Cabinet officials Tuesday night. Among the vessels would be sixty-three ships of the so-called "laid-up fleet" from the World War days, owned by the U.S. Maritime Commission. Officials believe, according to the Post, that this fleet "would tide Britain over the next few months," i.e, keep the beleaguered Empire capital supplied with food, munitions, and raw materials.
The New York Times account of the meeting, by Turner Catledge, mentions an additional startling detail -- not only is the Administration talking about releasing merchant tonnage to Britain, but they’re also seriously looking at "the more contentious proposal that United States naval vessels might convoy merchant shipping half way across the Atlantic." That may be entirely justifiable, especially if the alternative is the specter of British starvation or surrender. But it goes a long way, much more than anything taken up so far, toward getting America’s military directly into battle with the Nazis. Would that be too much of a strain upon the fragile, emerging consensus favoring aid to Britain? The isolationists may be in the minority, but they’re powerful enough to create a paralyzing political ruckus out of a few shooting incidents.
Maybe we don’t need to face that question just yet. An Associated Press story says that the British acknowledge the loss of 327,157 tons of merchant shipping to Nazi submarines in a four-week period ending Nov. 24. That might sound huge, but it pales alongside the 881,000 tons of shipping lost to the Kaiser’s U-boats in April, 1917, when Britain was left with no more than a six-week supply of food. The German attacks on Britain’s naval lifeline are serious -- but not critical.
THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE LAUDS VICHY FRANCE. I’m always a little startled when isolationists echo Fascist propaganda, whether they mean to or not. The latest eyebrow-raising moment came when reading a Chicago Tribune story Wednesday, filed by correspondent David Darrah from Marseilles, about a visit to the city from Unoccupied France’s "leader" --
"Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, chief of state, took this part of France literally by storm....The popular reception, in an area that had been noted for communism and Socialism before the Petain government recently began a cleanup, reached its climax here. Until late tonight Marseilles’ streets were impassable because of the crowds that turned out. Everywhere there was evidence that the French are regaining confidence and that victory has been written in the hardest chapter of the bloodless revolution. Members of [Petain’s] entourage declared the acclaim the marshal received would set at rest the propaganda campaign conducted by French emigres in America against his government."
"Bloodless revolution"? Is this Mr. Darrah’s, or the Tribune’s, preferred term now for "Fascist takeover"? Maybe I missed it, but I don’t recall the Tribune recording other recent manifestations of this French "victory" -- such as Marshal Petain’s decrees last month banning Jews from public service, the press, radio, and cinema. The Petain regime now brands itself "a harmonious combination of authority and liberty" (with an emphasis on the former) and says coyly that certain foreign political experiments "possess common sense and beauty" (no prize for guessing which ones). Are ordinary Frenchmen indeed cheering this platform? Perhaps, to the contrary, a desperate, defeated people will applaud what few national symbols they have left, and Petain’s heroic service in the last war remains a potent symbol. All the more a shame, then, that he disgraces his past by the manner in which he now bends a knee to his Nazi conquerors and pretends to find something "French" in the groveling, quasi-Nazi dictatorship he imposes upon his people.
"MEN CAN BE FREE." Walter Lippmann’s column in Tuesday’s New York Herald Tribune finds that the Battle of Britain offers a profound lesson to "this smart and unbelieving, this clever and neurotic generation" --
"In the past six months modern men have passed, some directly and others vicariously, through the most terrible and the most ennobling experience in the history of the modern world. For in this period which began with the miracle of Dunkirk, there has been revealed what modern societies had forgotten and ceased to believe in: that men can be free, not merely in the political sense but in the religious meaning of the word, free to collect themselves in all adversity and by the sheer force of the human will to become the masters rather than the victims of fate. This revelation that the ancient convictions about men are true is one of the very greatest events of a long epoch, transcending in importance and its consequences all the fluctuating incidents of battle, providing the people of the world with an armour of the soul and a sword of the spirit which has already altered and will surely alter more decisively the course of history. For the first time since popular government came into being a whole people has faced the full fury of a total war, and by sheer tenacity and conviction withstood it. Their reward is that they proved that modern society can be redeemed from the apathy, the cynicism, and the materialism which were destroying it more surely than all the bombs that have fallen on the English cities."
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