The Pittsburgh Press (April 6, 1944)
I DARE SAY —
Anniversary
By Florence Fisher Parry
Three years ago today, Hitler marched into Greece. Yes, it has been three years since the great old names leaped back into the news – the Battle of Marathon, the Battle of Thermopylae. Then it was not long until we heard that the Swastika was flying over the Parthenon. And the Greeks in America, or indeed wherever they were – those who were not in their native land when the shameful blow struck – bowed their heads and wept for their conquered brothers and could not be comforted.
Since then, other proud cities have fallen; some have been burned away; but it seems to me that nothing carried the indignity of Athens fallen, that pure and classic monument to form and beauty!
The mind cannot face what must be the degradation which the people of Greece have suffered in the last three years. It was nothing to starve or suffer disease or be stretched on the rack of pain. But to bite the dust before a breed of inferior vandals, this was the gall that killed.
What of Rome?
Now it might be well on this third anniversary of Hitler’s march into Greece to think of what is to be the fate of that other seat of glory, the city of Rome, for the question now is agitated: Shall the Allies be driven into destroying Rome?
It might be in order for us to remind ourselves how long the Parthenon would have endured, how long the city of Athens, under German attack, if there could have been Allied resistance; if the Greeks had had arms.
Some time ago, one of our best radio commentators, Raymond Gram Swing, in one of his very finest broadcasts, discussed the Vera Brittain pronouncement on “massacre by bombing” and its endorsement by some American clergymen, and disposed of this question thus:
The bombing of Berlin, like the previous bombing of London, could have been avoided. The war against civilians, which the Nazis have known how to prosecute with ruthless barbarity, and which the Allies have resorted to with their own measures of blockade and bombing, could have been avoided. No one who gave a thought to this war as it was sure to be fought, in the heyday of industrial and scientific invention, had any doubt that it would be more terrible than any war ever waged before.
So, there was every humane prompting to stop it at the time it could have been stopped. Miss Brittain, and the clergymen around her, issue a call for repentance. They call only for repentance for the consequence of failure, not for the failure itself.
Is it not more to the point to think back to Munich where Czechoslovakia was mutilated on the altar of Hitler’s greed as a gift of appeasement, by honorable men who loathed war? One can go farther back to the day when Ethiopia in chains was given over to Italy, as a cheap way to avoid war with a bullying, belligerent Mussolini. Preceding that was the Japanese descent on Manchuria.
I do not know whether any of the signers of the call to repentance preached about the inevitable folly of giving way before the blusterings of Mussolini, or warned of approaching perils in Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland, or his renunciation of the Treaty of Locarno. If they had a clear record of having opposed the inexorable sequence of events which produced the war with all its horrors, I imagine they would say so. But that is not their plea or their approach.
We know that Berlin is not being bombed so as to kill civilians. It is being bombed to weaken German industry, hence the Nazi ability to kill our soldiers. It is being bombed to reduce the Luftwaffe, so that when the invasion of Europe is ventured more of our soldiers will survive that essential campaign.
France, Britain helpless
It was the Germans who created the Luftwaffe. Violating their pledges under the peace treaty, they built this vast and unprecedented force, and invited chosen witnesses from abroad to open their astonished eyes to it.
With this force, the Nazis set out to make themselves dominant in the world. The accord of Munich was written under the shadow of the wings of the Luftwaffe. France and Britain wrung their hands as they sacrificed Czechoslovakia. We are helpless, their leaders said privately, for we cannot prevent the bombing of Paris and London.
There is only one way to avoid great wars, and that is to snuff them out when they are at their early and little beginnings, and to do it then with concerted vigor. So long as this resolve burns in all American minds, and no attempt is permitted to frustrate it, peace, if not pacifism, will have been served.
The lesson of this war, including the bombing of cities, is not that wars are brutal, and should be less brutal, but that wars are preventable and should be prevented.