The Johnson Act almost persuaded some Germans that we had changed sides, and Nazis revived their chatter about the essentially Germanic character of America. We Americans may be wishful thinkers, but the Germans, fortunately, are even more addicted to the vice than we. Goebbels’ control of the press promotes it. Every isolationist speech made is printed at length in the German newspapers and the voice of Lindbergh is taken as the voice of America. The re-election of Roosevelt was the first warning the German people had that America might act to defend herself. Now sensible Germans are beginning to be frightened. I know how the German people regard America. They call it the “land of unlimited possibilities.” It has always been the dreamland of the Germans, and if our immigration laws had permitted it, we should have had tens of millions of Germans coming to this country after the war. The tremendous size and economic power of America fascinate all classes of Germans; they have never forgotten the shock they received when, after the armistice in 1918, they learned for the first time what their government had concealed from them, that there were over two million American soldiers in France. Hitler tried to stamp out German admiration or regard for any foreign country, and doubtless German successes in this war have influenced the German attitude to a degree, but the fundamental element in German thought about America is their ineffaceable memory of the last war: “America joined our enemies; we lost. If America goes to war against us again, we cannot win.” It would be decisive.

Q. But where would we fight Germany? What is the good of America’s entering the war if there is no battleground?

A. We would fight her first where we are fighting her now, in the Atlantic and on all the seas. The difference between our naval action if we were at war and as it is under the President’s orders to hunt down pirates, would be considerable. At war we would fully collaborate with the British Navy in the critical waters along the coast of Europe and in the zone of greatest danger just west of England where the Germans sink about nine-tenths of their victims. The reason the Germans have been so much more effective in counter-blockading England in this war than they were in the last war is of course the airplane, which not only bombs and sinks as many ships as the submarine, but also provides the submarine with eyes in the air.

Our air force, and especially our naval air force, greatly augmented after our entry into the war, would play a large role in cleansing the air of these German raiders. Eventually our air force operating with the R.A.F. and based wherever the R.A.F. is based would, we hope, become strong enough to dominate the air over the continent. That is the goal toward which all efforts lead; it would be the turning point of the war. Experts estimate that it will probably take two years to reach quantitative superiority over the Germans, and then only if we are not only formally at war but actually making war with all our might.

The site of the battlefields after the winning of the Battle of the Atlantic and the Battle of Britain, depends upon too many unknown factors to make more than a guess now. Possible landing places for an expeditionary force extend from Norway to the Spanish frontier, North Africa, the Near East, and the Balkans. There are also the immense possibilities opened by the Battle of Russia. In considering the possibilities of success for an expeditionary force to invade German Europe we ought not to be discouraged by the failure of the Allies in Norway, Greece, and Crete, because the German Army’s morale and strength will be quite different whenever the conditions for invasion of the continent exist. It was the German Air Force which, more than any other factor, defeated the Allies in these three early affrays.

When the Luftwaffe has lost control of the daylight air and the German Army is still further weakened by its colossal losses in Russia, and the German people are weighed down by the fear of ultimate defeat and apprehension of vengeance, and the population of conquered Europe, elated at the prospect of liberation, is revolting, the chances of success for an Allied Expeditionary Force would be strong. Military experts are agreed that it would court disaster to try it before these conditions are fulfilled. Ever since the Battle of Russia began, impatient groups in England have clamored for an immediate attempt at invasion of the continent, and one can imagine how painful it must be for the perpetually aggressive Churchill to be forced to counsel prudence. He knows that if such an attempt were made and failed it could be fatal. On the other hand, if the Allied High Command waits for the favorable circumstances which are to be expected if we enter the war, we could justly hope not only to be able to invade the continent successfully but at low cost.

Q. Would United States troops be required for such an expeditionary force? Are we going to have another A.E.F.?

A. I should think so, although one must admit the bare possibility that the Battle of Russia could make our participation with land troops less necessary militarily, although the political reasons for our entry would be strongest if the Red Army were winning. If the Russians were to whittle down the German land army sufficiently, the British might become strong enough eventually to deliver the knockout blow alone, but I doubt it. There are just twice as many Germans as there are English, and numbers still count, as we observe in Russia. A cool appraisal of the future indicates that the chances are against our being able to win the war without sending an A.E.F. If we go to war, it cannot be with any reservations. We cannot make war on a limited liability basis. There are strong reasons also for us to want to be represented in the armies of liberation. By the time matters have reached the stage for contemplation of an invasion of Europe, the temper of America may have so changed that there may be a great popular demand for an A.E.F.

Q. What are the strong reasons for our wanting to be represented with the armies of liberation?

A. In order to be fully represented at the peace. There is no substitute for an army at a Peace Conference, and we may be sure that, no matter what arrangements may be made between Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt, if we are not in the war we will not be in the peace. There were many jokes about the famous eight-point meeting to the effect that we were trying to get in the peace before we got in the war. I do not agree that that was the purpose of Mr. Roosevelt in meeting Mr. Churchill, but if it were, it is unlikely to succeed. We will have the influence we wish to have at the peace conference only if we have done our full share in making peace possible by beating Hitler. We ought not to deceive ourselves. We are unpopular enough as it is now. If we stay out of the war, and by a miracle not now foreseeable, Hitler were after all to be defeated, what do you think the victors would think of us? Do you think they would invite us to come in and tell them how to rearrange the world?

Yet if we do not look forward to establishing a peace which will postpone for a long time, if not forever, a repetition of this war, many Americans would feel too discouraged to act. We would be foolish not to fight the Germans now even if we were mathematically certain that we were going to have to go on fighting them once every twenty years for the rest of time. Nevertheless we do not want to face such a prospect; we want to rule out war for as long a time as possible, and we can do it only by repairing at this Peace Conference the errors made after the last one.

These errors were not what they have been represented to be, faults in the Versailles treaty. The mistake we made was that we dodged our responsibility for the peace after we had helped finish the war. First we invested our blood and treasure, and then after the victory, when we were about to gather the dividends of international security and prosperity in the League of Nations, suddenly, because everything in the peace did not completely please us, and because a few politicians hated the President, we withdrew and declined to collect our profits. This ruined the peace, made the League impossible, and another war certain.

Q. How much American blood and treasure did we spend in the last war?

A. Very little blood compared with our Allies. Out of our total mobilized force of 4,355,000 we lost 126,000 dead of all causes, or two and one-half per cent. Out of the total of 17,314,000 British and French soldiers, 2,266,171 lost their lives, or 13 per cent. If we had been compelled from 1914 on to fight as totally as our Allies, with our population more than double the combined French and British populations, we would have lost more than 2,000,000 dead during the time we were leaving the fighting to our Allies, from 1914 to 1917. We sent money instead; altogether our war loans totaled thirteen billion dollars. It is fair to say that this investment of money took the place of investment of lives. It cost us less than $7,000 apiece to save 2,000,000 American men’s lives. Any insurance company would call that a bargain, considering the American man merely from the point of view of what he is economically worth to his nation. Nevertheless we asked for the thirteen billion back. At the same time we put up our tariffs so high that the nations concerned could not pay, but aside altogether from the economic aspect of our war debts, consider what could have happened had we been wiser.

Suppose, at an appropriate period after passions had subsided, we had proposed to Britain and France that we cancel the war debts if they would cancel the reparations owed by Germany. There was a time when such a proposal might have succeeded. What would have been the probable, or at any rate possible, outcome? No war debts, no reparations, no inflation in Germany, no Hitler, no war now. Even if there were only a chance of such miraculous results, it would have been well worth trying, since the actual results of our unenlightened egotism were that we were never paid the money anyway, and the chain of reparations—inflation—Hitler—brought us to this war upon which we are planning already to spend as a mere first installment four times as much as the whole sum we lent the Allies and lost in the last war. It is significant that the very men who urged that we press without respite for full payment of our World War debts, and thus helped make this war inevitable, are the very men who today continue to try to make America shirk her responsibilities.

Q. Do you think a new League of Nations could be successful, since the old one failed so miserably?

A. Yes, if we do our duty and make it possible for the League to work. We blew the old League up when we refused to join it, and rejected the Versailles treaty and declined to join France and England in a treaty of mutual guarantee. With us not participating, the League was doomed from the start. Our withdrawal from Europe upset the balance of power so heavily in Germany’s favor that France, and eventually Britain, had to make out of the League a coalition against Germany. This they did. Even so it failed to keep the peace because Germany was stronger than all the League members together. Had we stayed in the League we might have made collective security really work.

Q. How could America have made the League work?

A. There is a popular belief that Germany might have remained a good neighbor and respectable member of society if the Weimar Republic had been better treated by France and her Allies. I am not sure of that, but if it is true, let us ask why France treated Germany harshly throughout the life of the Weimar Republic. The answer is that France was afraid of Germany, and as we see today, with good reason. The French fear was based on the facts that there were twice as many Germans as French, and that these Germans had just about beaten France and all her Allies, including Great Britain, until the United States stepped in. Obviously the French reasoned the United States’ protection was indispensable to French security. Without the United States in the League the French had to look for security elsewhere. They sought it in encirclement of Germany and conversion of the League into an anti-German alliance.

If you object that the League is impracticable, let us ask what there is to put in its place. I use the term League to indicate any association of nations for collective security. Isolationism was our policy from 1919 to 1941. Its failure has been cosmic. The group of Senators and Congressmen who killed the League by preventing us from joining it were as responsible as Hitler for the war today. Twenty-two years later the political successors of Wilson’s “willful men” made it appear to Hitler and Mussolini and the war party in Japan that we would never stir and that aggressors could leave the United States completely out of their reckoning. Many of these men in the Senate and the House are today, as the isolationists were in 1919, actuated chiefly by an ignoble hatred for their political opponent, the President.

Carlton J. Hayes, professor of history at Columbia, says: “We were the final determining factor in winning the last World War, but more than any nation, even more than Nazi Germany, we have been responsible for losing the peace and bringing on the present world war. We insisted on our rights and spurned our duties. Victim ourselves of a bad kind of narrow nationalism, we repudiated the League of Nations which our President had fashioned and we thus set the pace for all of its later floutings by other powers. Moreover we selfishly and shortsightedly refused to forgive the inter-Allied debts and thereby prevented any timely forgiving of the fateful German reparations. The result is that Germany now has Hitler, while we are accumulating a debt for national defense which makes the inter-Allied debts and the reparations of the last war seem trivial.”

Q. If we did defeat Germany, could we then return to the kind of peaceful lives we led before this war began?

A. No, but the defeat of Germany is the indispensable condition for us to have any kind of tolerable life again. After this war, which is likely to last many years still, we are going to be a different nation. We are going to be more united than ever before. We are going to have shared common dangers, hopes, and fears, and for the first time since the Civil War we are going to rise above our materialism and act for an ideal.

We have never had to face real trouble together since the thirty million new members of our family arrived between 1870 and 1930. We did not really suffer in the first World War; we never had a chance to test the strength of our arms or the temper of our spirit. How many times have we heard the question asked, whether we were “really” a nation? Now we shall have the chance to prove that we are. Now America will come of age.