A. Going to war would unquestionably cure all the troubles of the Army sooner or later. It is not our soldiers’ fault if today in peacetime they are restless and discontented at being compelled to do what must seem to them very like playing at being soldiers. Would the spirit of a football team be good if the team did nothing but practice football all day long, month in and month out, and never played a game, and had no games scheduled? What would be the spirit of a cast of players if they had rehearsals every day for months and never staged a performance to an audience, and had no performances scheduled?
Q. From your travel throughout the country have you formed any impression of what the morale of the Army actually is?
A. Yes, from personal observation, I have reluctantly had to admit the impression that many of the selectees, at any rate, do not understand why they are in the Army, nor why there should be conscription, nor why their period of service was extended. In a word, they have no desire to fight. Now this could be a most serious matter, since any nation is doomed if its youth, or any considerable number of them, are not willing to fight for it, yet this mood would vanish on our entry into war. The boys are not to blame. To blame are all the leaders who have confused and deceived them, the teachers who taught them pacifism and the isolationist politicians who do the work of Hitler. One of the elements most confusing in the Army mind is the promise rashly made in the presidential campaign that we should never engage in a “foreign war,” a promise no American should have made because nobody except Hitler had the power to fulfill it.
Now we are paying the penalty democracy always has to pay for hypocrisy and for deceptions in elections. The penalty is the state of mind exposed in a questionnaire taken at Camp Callan, San Diego, among selectees, and published with elation by an isolationist journal. The soldiers answered: (a) Should the United States go to war with the Axis immediately? Affirmative, 1 per cent. (b) Should the United States continue its policy of all-out economic aid to Britain and expand America’s military and naval forces in order to fight the Axis powers overseas if the Axis powers are not defeated by Britain? Affirmative, 25 per cent. (c) Should the United States guard the Western Hemisphere but send no military aid outside this area? Affirmative, 39 per cent. (d) Should the United States be strictly neutral and prepare to defend only our own territory and possessions? Affirmative, 37 per cent. These answers would have distressed Count Leo Tolstoy if Tolstoy were an American living today.
Tolstoy, who was as great a student of war as he was a novelist, has a formula whereby he could interpret this poll and give us a rough estimate of the military effectiveness of an army made up of soldiers with the attitude revealed by this questionnaire. In War and Peace, his epic novel on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, he says: “In warfare the force of armies is the product of the mass multiplied by something else, an unknown X. X is the spirit of the army, the greater or less desire to fight and to face dangers on the part of all the men composing the army.” Note that Tolstoy says “desire to fight” not just “willingness to fight.” The emphasis is on the positive desire not passive willingness. This is another way to express the paramount importance of morale. What is morale? It is knowing what you have to fight about and having the desire to fight for it. But only one per cent of the selectees questioned indicated they knew what they had to fight about and desired to fight; one-third thought we ought to be “strictly neutral,” and three-fourths were against fighting anywhere outside of our hemisphere.
Q. The selectees evidently had been influenced by the arguments for passive hemisphere defense, but what do you think of the argument that we should never fight on foreign soil, but if we have to fight, let it be in America?
A. It reminds me of the Chinese and the Japanese soldiers at the beginning of their war. I saw the fall of Shanghai, and I couldn’t help but remark that while the Chinese soldier said, “I will die for China,” the Japanese soldier said, “I will kill for Japan,” and so for a long time the two got along perfectly together. For every American who may declare, “I don’t want to fight on foreign soil; if I have to fight I want to fight only at home,” there is a German who declares, “I don’t want to fight at home; I fight only on foreign soil,” as the Germans have consistently done to the best of their ability for the last hundred years. May we never accommodate the Germans in this respect. Surely of all the isolationist arguments this is the least intelligent, to prefer that the fearful destruction of war be wrought on our own homes. It is an argument you will never hear in our Southern states.
Q. What should we do with conscientious objectors?
A. Reason with them. Many honest conscientious objectors can be converted by the right kind of reasoning, and the more honest they are the easier it is to straighten out their misunderstandings. If this fails then they ought to be given work to do at some enterprise of national interest, and be compelled to do it, as the government is now doing in its camps for conscientious objectors. If they refuse to register, they go to jail, as no government could afford to tolerate deliberate defiance of its laws. We as a democracy must observe the rights even of a minority which would bring ruin upon the country if its policies were to rule. This is something we can be proud of, something that marks us more than any other one thing as different from the tyrannous Nazi state where conscientious objectors and every variety of pacifist or obstructionist is put to death. We can afford to treat our objectors as we would defectives. Hitler has to kill his. He held from the beginning that pacifists were the greatest danger to the state, and from the moment he came to power he has sought out and executed every German pacifist who has revealed himself. Hitler thus proves he feels that pacifist doctrine would be dangerous to his regime, as it would.
The German nation is being led by Hitler in aggressive war. Opposition to aggressive war is a form of pacifism which makes sound sense. The war we and the British are called upon to fight, a war we did not want but are compelled to carry on in order to save our national lives, is a war that even a pacifist ought to support. In this war the man who refuses to fight for his country is like a person in a lifeboat who refuses to pull an oar. In England a conscientious objector was asked at his examination whether he would do non-combatant war work. He answered, “No.” The Judge asked “Would you not help build an air-raid shelter?” The man answered, “No.” The Judge then asked, “But if there were an air raid on would you go into a shelter someone else had built?” The man answered, “Yes.” I wonder how many of the 1,800 young Americans who have been classified as conscientious objectors would contend that this is honest, and yet it is fundamentally the attitude of all conscientious objectors. The nation shelters the lives, liberty, and property of all its citizens. Everyone living in the nation is enjoying this protection. Everyone has a primary obligation to help maintain it. In England today, however, the government permits more than 40,000 registered conscientious objectors to enjoy the protection of the air-raid shelters, and of the Royal Air Force, Army, and Navy, without contributing to it. Is this not a tribute to the invincible liberalism of Anglo-Saxon democracy?