THEY’RE BOMBING BERLIN. One day after Londoners felt the blows of Nazi bombs for the first time, the Royal Air Force has responded with an air attack on the heart of Berlin. The New York Times’ C. Brooks Peters calls it Berlin’s "first real baptism of fire." According to the United Press, British warplanes hit the Nazi capital in two waves early Monday morning, causing "heavy explosions" and unspecified damage. The Germans claim the only damage was a hit on a nursery by an incendiary bomb. "It caused a fire that was quickly extinguished by a gardener," reports the Times. But C.B.S.’s William Shirer said in last night’s broadcast that at least three Berlin streets have been cordoned off, though "it was impossible to get near enough to see why." And, however much damage was done, most of Berlin’s 4,000,000 citizens were sent to shelters for over three hours by the raid.
But the Germans are still giving a lot more than they’re getting in the air war. This morning’s radio reports say the Luftwaffe was busy over London for over six hours last night. One report says there are no estimates yet of casualties and property damage, but both are considered "heavy." The Nazis have dropped dozens of bombs on cities in the industrial Midlands as well, and have blasted the naval base at Portsmouth again. Another report today surmises that the circular flight of planes in the latest raid on London suggests its purpose is to be more of a "nuisance" to the civilian population than a blow at military objectives. An editorial in Monday’s Washington Post surmises that the Germans, still not having gained mastery of the air over Britain, have turned to raids "whose sole purpose is terrorization."
One wonders to what end. Obviously the Nazi attacks over the last two weeks haven’t gained them mastery of the air, at least not yet. And terror raids aren’t going to get them any closer to this. Meanwhile, the words of German officials in this regard seem to imply a most un-Nazi hesitation. According to the Times, German officials said Sunday they "know nothing" about the initial raid on London, and failed to mention it in their daily war communique. What gives?
EYEWITNESS REPORTS FROM TWO CAPITALS. C.B.S.’s London correspondent, Edward R. Murrow, toured eleven air raid shelters in London’s West End last night, and lauded the courage of ordinary Britons in his evening broadcast -- "Tonight they’re magnificent. I’ve seen them, talked with them, and I know." He offered listeners images of ordinary life in the shelters while the bombs fell -- a Scotsman regaling some twenty-five people with a windy fish story, and two babies who "looked like well-wrapped dolls" sleeping on a hard wooden bench. Apparently the biggest dissension he found was in one shelter where a pipe smoker wanted to light up and the warden forbade him, saying it was against the rules.
William Shirer, reporting for C.B.S. from Berlin, managed in spite of Nazi censorship to get across the contrast between the official German press and what’s really going on in the streets of Berlin. While the R.A.F.’s three-hour raid on Berlin got only "a six-line news item" in the Berlin papers, the "inhabitants of the town certainly made it their main topic of conversation." For the first time they’ve lost sleep to the din of anti-aircraft fire. Mr. Shirer also noted that the British dropped leaflets along with bombs, telling Germans that the war "will last as long as Hitler does."
INVASION OF BRITAIN LESS LIKELY? Edwin L. James contends in a Sunday New York Times analysis that there might not be any Nazi invasion of Britain after all this year, and he suggests that the war could enter a relative lull with the onset of cold weather --
"If the Germans were to try landing in the first week of September, even if they could use the beaches then, the approach of bad weather would bring them in a few weeks up against inability to use the beaches for landing. The more delay there is, the more the prospect becomes a deterrent for them....If the Germans do not attempt their invasion of Britain almost immediately there will be good reason to surmise that they will not try it this year. If they have to postpone it until next year, no one can tell what the situation will be then. The British hold that time works for them, that their production of airplanes is mounting relative to the production of Germany and it is often said in London that the war with Germany will look like a different proposition in 1941. If there is to be no invasion this year, what will the Winter bring? One has often heard it said that the Germans could send 5,000 planes over Britain at one time. That is probably an exaggeration, but still it is a good surmise that they can increase the severity of their air raids. Here again one can not only offset the severe punishment the British planes have been able to inflict upon the raiders, but also calculate that the bad Winter weather will interfere with bombing raids."
CONSCRIPTION BILL PASSAGE NEAR? Senator Barkley of Kentucky, the Democratic leader of the Senate, now predicts that the Burke-Wadsworth bill will pass the Senate either Wednesday or Thursday with a "substantial majority." And according to Coleman B. Jones in the New York Herald Tribune, the House is set to pass this week an excess profits tax-defense amortization bill, judged by the Administration to be "necessary to remove one of the major obstacles encountered by the National Defense Advisory Commission in awarding aircraft and other equipment expansion contracts." Mr. Jones reports that these two developments portend "a break in the legislative log jam" on defense issues. It can’t come soon enough -- a story in Sunday’s Herald Tribune reveals that despite the millions appropriated this year for new aircraft, the U.S. actually had eighty fewer warplanes at the end of June than at the beginning of the year.
Maybe the Chicago Tribune is already bowing to the inevitable, since their Monday front page indicates a lull in their news and editorial blitzkrieg against the Burke-Wadsworth bill. The closest thing to a comment on the bill is a long story by Walter Trohan, which says that according to unnamed "responsible army and navy officers and defense experts," a nation trying to invade America would have a near-impossible time of it. According to the Tribune, an invader would need two to three years of preparation before attacking, and would have to have the following -- at least 1,000,000 men, 300,000 rifles, 100,000 pistols, 15,000 machine guns, 19,500 cannon, 445,000,000 rounds of rifle ammunition, 50,000,000 rounds of pistol ammunition, 200,000,000 rounds of machine gun ammunition, 100,000 tons of bombs, 1,500 tanks, 1,800 scout cars, 200,000 other motor vehicles, 7,500 warplanes, 1,000 transports, 2,000 freighters, 500 supply ships, 250 oil tankers, and at least 400 fighting ships. The argument seems to be that we don’t need to draft men. Or, perhaps the Tribune is really saying we don’t need to do anything. Perhaps they'd like to change the national anthem to Let Us Go on Dreaming.
WILLKIE HOLDS SLIGHT ELECTORAL LEAD. Dr. Gallup’s election survey in Sunday’s Washington Post says President Roosevelt has scored slight gains in his electoral vote total, leading slightly now in four states -- Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and Connecticut -- where he had trailed Wendell Willkie in the August 4 poll. But Mr. Willkie is still ahead with twenty states in his column, totally 284 electoral votes. Moreover, Willkie’s extended his lead in four states -- Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. The President is leading in twenty-eight states with 247 electoral votes. A total of 266 electoral votes are needed for victory.
But Dr. Gallup hedges plenty on how up-to-date these findings are -- "Two major developments of the last few days are not completely reflected in the Institute’s current study....(1) Mr. Willkie’s acceptance speech at Elwood, Ind., which Republicans are counting on to boost GOP strength, and (2) the latest phases of Adolph Hitler’s blitzkrieg against Britain, which some observers have expected might cause additional voters to favor a third term for Roosevelt. The greater part of the interviewing in the present survey was completed before the possible political effects of these widely differing events had time to sink in."
I’d be inclined to label that only one major development, as far as the election is concerned. A German invasion of Britain could well swing more voters toward President Roosevelt, especially if Hitler appears to be winning and the sentiment spreads that the U.S. might be next. But news reports of bombing raids which are inconclusive in their strategic impact likely wouldn’t have that much effect on American voters. Dr. Gallup is probably right, though, when he says the election, if held today, "would probably result in the closest race since the Wilson-Hughes election of 1916." I’d be willing to bet it ends up that way. It’s hard to imagine any president, no matter how personally popular, handily winning an unprecedented third term, absent a war or a widespread feeling that our survival is at stake.
Saturday, August 27, 2016
Thursday, August 25, 2016
Sunday, August 25, 1940
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.
(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.
Monday, August 22, 2016
Thursday, August 22, 1940
BRITISH WITHDRAWAL IN SOMALILAND. As far back as last week-end, the Italians were boasting that the port of Berbera in British Somaliland had become "another Dunkerque," where British troops were trapped by advancing Fascist armies. Unfortunately that appears to be pretty much true. According to an Associated Press report Tuesday, the 7,000 British defenders of Berbera have been withdrawn via ship, "under heavy Italian attack by tank, artillery, and aircraft." The British say rather hollowly that they held on in Berbera long enough to make Italy pay the "highest price" for her victory. British Somaliland itself is not of much strategic value, but officials in London fear "loss of prestige among the races of the Middle East."
And that could be militarily significant, according to Larry Rue’s account in Wednesday’s Chicago Tribune. The British admit this defeat "will result in a great loss to British prestige not only in Somaliland, Abyssinia, and Egypt, but thruout the Arab countries whose assistance at this time might contribute something toward final victory," he writes. Mr. Rue adds a number of precise details about the final days of the Somaliland fight, noting that Mussolini’s troops outnumbered the British defenders by as much as 15-to-1.
The A.P. predicts the Italians will fight for much bigger stakes next time -- staging "an aerial attempt to conquer Aden," the highly strategic British port at the lower tip of the Arabian peninsula.
GREECE RUSHES TROOPS TO FACE ITALY. It’s all so depressingly familiar. One of the Axis countries starts howling propaganda about a smaller neighbor’s "atrocities," and military aggression typically follows. This time, Greece is the expected victim, and Italy the apparent-aggressor-to-be. According to Cyrus Sulzberger in Wednesday’s New York Times, the Greek military has cancelled officer leaves, ordered its troops to "remain on watch" and is rushing units to the frontier of Italian-occupied Albania. The cause, reports the Times, is "Italian allegations of Greek terroristic activities in Albania, which Greek officials expect will prompt a warning note from Italy at any moment. "This may all be an unjustified flurry in the war of nerves being waged against this country," Mr. Sulzberger writes. "It may be something more." Whatever the reality, "alarming" reports of Italian troop movements on the Greek frontier, including the arrival of at least one armored division, have spooked Athens.
Curiously, the Germans have given the Greek government assurances that "no trouble should be expected," according to Mr. Sulzberger.
"NEVER IN THE FIELD OF HUMAN CONFLICT..." Prime Minister Churchill’s fifty-minute speech to the House of Commons on Tuesday saluted, with typical eloquence, the R.A.F. men who, according to Wednesday’s New York Herald Tribune, carried the air war to thirty German bases on the continent of Europe yesterday --
"Our bomber and fighter strength after all this fighting is larger than it ever has been....The attitude of every home in our island, in our empire, and indeed in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their mortal danger, are turning the tide of world war by their prowess and their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. All hearts go out to the fighter pilots whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes after day; but we must never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aim their attacks – often under the heaviest fire, often with heavy loss – with deliberate, careful discrimination, and inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the Nazi power."
Churchill also made news with an offer to give the U.S. leases for naval bases in the West Indies and Newfoundland, an offer which dovetails nicely with the establishment earlier this week of a U.S.-Canadian Joint Defense Board. Now, if only we had some well-trained, well-equipped troops to put into those bases.
WHAT WILLKIE SAID ABOUT PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES. Here’s the exact wording of the debate challenge by Wendell Willkie which has been mentioned quite a bit on the radio the last couple of days. He said near the end of his acceptance speech last Saturday --
"The President stated in his acceptance speech that he does not have either ‘the time or the inclination to engage in purely political debate.’ I do not want to engage in purely political debate, either. But I believe that the tradition of face-to-face debate is justly honored among our American political traditions. I believe that we should set an example, at this time, of the workings of American democracy. And I do not think the issues at stake are ‘purely political.’ In my opinion they concern the life and death of democracy. I propose that in the next two and a half months the President and I appear together on public platforms in various parts of the country to debate the fundamental issues of this campaign. These are the problems of our great domestic economy, as well as of our national defense....And also I would like to debate the question of the assumption by this President, in seeking a third term, of a greater public confidence than was accorded to our Presidential giants – Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. I make this proposal respectfully to a man upon whose shoulders rest the cares of the state. But I make it in dead earnest."
President Roosevelt’s replies so far, by contrast, have been anything but earnest. He first said he hadn’t heard anything of Mr. Willkie’s speech because he had been reviewing troops for five hours. A couple of days ago, he protested he was "too busy" with official duties. Since then, according to Percy Wood in Wednesday’s Chicago Tribune, Mr. Willkie has renewed the challenge -- "It is true that Franklin D. Roosevelt is President of the Untied States. It is equally true that he is running for a third term for President of the United States....The democratic process basically rests upon discussion..."
It’s a sound point, especially in this year of grave crisis. As democracy is threatened with extinguishment around the globe, it’s incumbent on Americans right now to display the highest possible example to the world of how a free people should choose their leaders. Mr. Willkie has set a fine standard with his own campaign. It’s time for the President to put aside ordinary political calculations and prove himself worthy of the challenge.
A GOOD SIGN FOR WILLKIE. A new Gallup survey in Wednesday’s Washington Post says that Willkie leads Roosevelt by a notable margin, 53% to 47%, in the bellwether state of Ohio. (The President had carried Ohio in 1936 with 61% of the vote). Dr. Gallup notes that Ohio "has cast its electoral votes for the winning candidate in every election since 1900, which means that anyone who had correctly forecast the Ohio winner in the last ten elections would have been picking the national winner as well."
And that could be militarily significant, according to Larry Rue’s account in Wednesday’s Chicago Tribune. The British admit this defeat "will result in a great loss to British prestige not only in Somaliland, Abyssinia, and Egypt, but thruout the Arab countries whose assistance at this time might contribute something toward final victory," he writes. Mr. Rue adds a number of precise details about the final days of the Somaliland fight, noting that Mussolini’s troops outnumbered the British defenders by as much as 15-to-1.
The A.P. predicts the Italians will fight for much bigger stakes next time -- staging "an aerial attempt to conquer Aden," the highly strategic British port at the lower tip of the Arabian peninsula.
GREECE RUSHES TROOPS TO FACE ITALY. It’s all so depressingly familiar. One of the Axis countries starts howling propaganda about a smaller neighbor’s "atrocities," and military aggression typically follows. This time, Greece is the expected victim, and Italy the apparent-aggressor-to-be. According to Cyrus Sulzberger in Wednesday’s New York Times, the Greek military has cancelled officer leaves, ordered its troops to "remain on watch" and is rushing units to the frontier of Italian-occupied Albania. The cause, reports the Times, is "Italian allegations of Greek terroristic activities in Albania, which Greek officials expect will prompt a warning note from Italy at any moment. "This may all be an unjustified flurry in the war of nerves being waged against this country," Mr. Sulzberger writes. "It may be something more." Whatever the reality, "alarming" reports of Italian troop movements on the Greek frontier, including the arrival of at least one armored division, have spooked Athens.
Curiously, the Germans have given the Greek government assurances that "no trouble should be expected," according to Mr. Sulzberger.
"NEVER IN THE FIELD OF HUMAN CONFLICT..." Prime Minister Churchill’s fifty-minute speech to the House of Commons on Tuesday saluted, with typical eloquence, the R.A.F. men who, according to Wednesday’s New York Herald Tribune, carried the air war to thirty German bases on the continent of Europe yesterday --
"Our bomber and fighter strength after all this fighting is larger than it ever has been....The attitude of every home in our island, in our empire, and indeed in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their mortal danger, are turning the tide of world war by their prowess and their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. All hearts go out to the fighter pilots whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes after day; but we must never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aim their attacks – often under the heaviest fire, often with heavy loss – with deliberate, careful discrimination, and inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the Nazi power."
Churchill also made news with an offer to give the U.S. leases for naval bases in the West Indies and Newfoundland, an offer which dovetails nicely with the establishment earlier this week of a U.S.-Canadian Joint Defense Board. Now, if only we had some well-trained, well-equipped troops to put into those bases.
WHAT WILLKIE SAID ABOUT PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES. Here’s the exact wording of the debate challenge by Wendell Willkie which has been mentioned quite a bit on the radio the last couple of days. He said near the end of his acceptance speech last Saturday --
"The President stated in his acceptance speech that he does not have either ‘the time or the inclination to engage in purely political debate.’ I do not want to engage in purely political debate, either. But I believe that the tradition of face-to-face debate is justly honored among our American political traditions. I believe that we should set an example, at this time, of the workings of American democracy. And I do not think the issues at stake are ‘purely political.’ In my opinion they concern the life and death of democracy. I propose that in the next two and a half months the President and I appear together on public platforms in various parts of the country to debate the fundamental issues of this campaign. These are the problems of our great domestic economy, as well as of our national defense....And also I would like to debate the question of the assumption by this President, in seeking a third term, of a greater public confidence than was accorded to our Presidential giants – Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. I make this proposal respectfully to a man upon whose shoulders rest the cares of the state. But I make it in dead earnest."
President Roosevelt’s replies so far, by contrast, have been anything but earnest. He first said he hadn’t heard anything of Mr. Willkie’s speech because he had been reviewing troops for five hours. A couple of days ago, he protested he was "too busy" with official duties. Since then, according to Percy Wood in Wednesday’s Chicago Tribune, Mr. Willkie has renewed the challenge -- "It is true that Franklin D. Roosevelt is President of the Untied States. It is equally true that he is running for a third term for President of the United States....The democratic process basically rests upon discussion..."
It’s a sound point, especially in this year of grave crisis. As democracy is threatened with extinguishment around the globe, it’s incumbent on Americans right now to display the highest possible example to the world of how a free people should choose their leaders. Mr. Willkie has set a fine standard with his own campaign. It’s time for the President to put aside ordinary political calculations and prove himself worthy of the challenge.
A GOOD SIGN FOR WILLKIE. A new Gallup survey in Wednesday’s Washington Post says that Willkie leads Roosevelt by a notable margin, 53% to 47%, in the bellwether state of Ohio. (The President had carried Ohio in 1936 with 61% of the vote). Dr. Gallup notes that Ohio "has cast its electoral votes for the winning candidate in every election since 1900, which means that anyone who had correctly forecast the Ohio winner in the last ten elections would have been picking the national winner as well."
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