The Evening Star (November 26, 1945)
Eliot: The anti-war party?
By Maj. George Fielding Eliot
The Pearl Harbor inquiry is doing a useful job in bringing to light many hitherto unpublished facts concerning the crucial period immediately preceding December 7, 1941.
It is also, unfortunately and probably inescapably, acting as a sounding-board for the reiteration of the theory that we, somehow could have stayed out of the war, that we ought to have stayed out of the war, that we would now be much better off if we had stayed out – that, in fact, going to war was worse for us than the inevitable consequences of not going to war.
This column reviewed some of those consequences the other day. The mail has brought a certain amount of abuse and vituperation for that review, but no factual refutation. No refutation is, indeed, possible.
If we had stayed out of the war, Britain, China and probably Russia would have been defeated, or would have been compelled to make terms with their Axis enemies.
If we had stayed out of the war, Europe, Asia and Africa would now be in the hands of the Nazis and the Japanese militarists. And South America? You guess that one.
If we had stayed out of the war, the scientists of Germany, with the resources of the whole world except North America at their disposal, would long since have found the secret of the atomic bomb, while we would not have had wartime powers and wartime appropriations to enable us to do likewise. Undisturbed by air attacks and by the need to prepare against western invasion, the Germans would have developed the world-destroying weapon.
The foes of all that America has championed and believed in and hoped for would have triumphed throughout the world, save in this continent, nor would our turn be long in coming.
It might be pertinent, if it were important, to ask whether these are the consequences which were desired by the men who are still saying that we would have been better off if we had “stood in bed.” But the minds of most of these are so clouded by prejudice and hatred as to be unreceptive to any facts which do not fit their preconceptions. They hate Franklin D. Roosevelt, they hate Britain and Russia, and apparently they would have been quite willing to accept the consequences to the American people of a Nazi-Jap victory, could they only have seen Britain and Russia defeated and Mr. Roosevelt discredited. Fortunately, such men have themselves been discredited by events.
What they say today has little if any influence on thinking Americans. They would hardly be worth mention by serious reporters, were it not for the legacy which they have left behind them – the faint remnants of the bitter feelings of 1940-41, of “America First” and the “stay-out-of-war” uproar. Consequently, there are still some well-intentioned folk who, rightly considering the war a great disaster, have not yet fully grasped the realization that American aloofness from the war would have been a far greater disaster, and one from which there could have been no recovery.
Insofar as this feeling is beclouding the political attitudes of Republican leaders in and out of Congress, it is a matter of the gravest national importance.
If, in any measure at all, the Republican Party is going to accept this false interpretation of history and mold its political doctrine on this theory, it is of the first importance that the voters of this country should fully understand all that is thereby implied. We live now in a world where only eternal vigilance and eternal readiness for effective action, both in diplomacy and in the military policy which must support our diplomacy, can possibly preserve from destruction this nation and the civilization of which it is the strongest pillar.
The timely use of force against the seeds and breeding places of future wars may be our only salvation in the years to come. If we are not ready morally to use force, we shall never be ready materially to do so. We shall not be ready morally if we begin with the idea in high places that the late war had better never have been fought at all, that our dead died in vain, that our victories had better never have been won.