It read:
“Where is Tommy? The units of the British army which had occupied certain sectors of the Maginot line were immediately withdrawn after the beginning of the German offensive. They were transported as quickly as possible in the direction of the Channel. For political reasons it was necessary to conceal this movement, so it was carried out at night. Nevertheless the population of Lorraine could observe easily enough that the English were retiring, and in various cities and towns hostile demonstrations took place against them. Several times the police and French troops had to intervene to calm the crowds and suppress the demonstrations. French Soldiers! You see how the English are trying to get out just as they did in Norway. They are taking ‘English leave.’ They are leaving you alone on the battlefield. Are you stupid enough to die for those who are quitting you to save their precious skins? You had better give the English the answer they deserve for having betrayed you.”
Now there was not a word of truth in this propaganda about trouble between British troops and French civilians, and I thought the leaflet far too crude to have any effect, but I was mistaken; it corresponded to the unreasoning feeling of many Frenchmen that the French Army was bearing all the burden. They particularly resented the fact that whereas at the beginning of the war the French mobilized all men from twenty to forty-seven years old, the British at first mobilized only those from twenty to twenty-five years old. The British Fleet, the French knew theoretically, was just as important for beating Hitler as the French Army, but the British Fleet was far away and its actions were unobserved. Just so today in America we all know theoretically that the presence of the British Fleet in the Atlantic is imperative for our safety, but the British Fleet is far away, and so even when we are sending supplies to the British Fleet and other arms standing between us and our enemy, many Americans think of it as “aiding Britain,” and feel quite unselfish about it.
A minor group in America also persists in blaming the British so heavily for their now amply admitted and fully atoned faults of the past, that some of them would almost rather see Munich revenged by German troops in England than have America defend herself there. Finally we have our anti-British Americans of Irish origin who consider Oliver Cromwell more blameworthy than Hitler, although all Irish-Americans are not so purblind by any means. Taking it all in all, however, I should say that there is an even stronger anti-British sentiment in America today than there was in France during the war, and this when coupled to the broader anti-Europe feeling of a great many Americans, increases the difficulty of our acting realistically against a powerful enemy who is taking every advantage of these enfeebling prejudices of ours.
Q. You have named so many similarities between ourselves and the French that it is discouraging indeed, but we have one undeniable advantage of a large population, and we surely are not obsessed by our birth rate.
A. It is true that we do not worry about our birth rate, although perhaps we ought to, but we suffer just the same from something very much like the French obsession with theirs. It was the French preoccupation with their inferiority in numbers, and their falling birth rate, which prevented them not merely from wasting lives, but even from using them thriftily on the battlefield, and the result was the debacle. During the Battle of France I seldom saw Colonel Schieffer, in the French Ministry of Information, that he did not exclaim, “We cannot bleed like this again. Twice in a generation is too much. We have only twenty million Frenchmen. This time we must make an end of the Boches so they can never empty our veins again.” The Colonel, who was personally most warlike, was under the impression we all had that the French Army was losing lives heavily, and he was willing that it be done to prevent ever again such bloodshed in the future, yet as a matter of fact, the impulse to save French lives had already become so strong in the Army High Command that it governed all great decisions and contributed seriously to the defeat.
Now despite the fact that we are a nation of 130,000,000 we are obsessed to an equal degree with the fear of having to fight in large numbers; we have what amounts to a phobia against sending an American Expeditionary Force to Europe. We seem not to mind nearly so much the idea of American boys in the Navy or the Air Force fighting and dying abroad, but when it comes to the Army we recoil at the idea of an A.E.F. Why the life of an infantryman should be more precious than that of an aviator or sailor is not clear. The explanation of this attitude must be found in the comparative numbers of men involved.
A.E.F. brings up the idea of millions of American boys laying down their lives on the battlefield, and most Americans completely forget, if they ever did know, that although we had 4,355,000 men mobilized during the last war, the total number of them killed in action and died of wounds received in action was 50,475. This is roughly one-half of the number of persons killed by accident in the United States every year. We nevertheless erected in every village and city of the land large expensive monuments to our war dead, and the impression became indelibly fixed in the American mind that we had lost millions, or at any rate hundreds of thousands of dead. The vision of this mass sacrifice of American youth is what moves the American people to reject so violently the idea of an expeditionary force. We ought now to be adult enough to see that our penurious attitude toward our precious American blood reflects the same feeling as the French, with more justification, had toward their birth rate, and that if persisted in, this attitude will lead us to similar disaster.
Q. Aren’t there any encouraging differences between ourselves and the unfortunate French?
A. I am glad to say there are, and enough, I devoutly hope, to save us from their fate. We have a leader; the French had none. We are not divided as badly as the French were divided. Despite the fierceness of our political passions, it would be a very exceptional American indeed who would say, “I’d rather have Hitler than Roosevelt,” as so many Frenchmen used to say, “We’d rather have Hitler than Leon Blum.” We are physically a healthier people than the French. There is hardly one of the weaknesses now perceptible in the American people that would not be swept away by the fact of our going to war, but there is hardly one of them which can be removed by any other means.