Is Tomorrow Hitler's? 200 Questions on the Battle of Mankind

by H. R. Knickerbocker

We have to include here also the fact that the Russian is an excellent pilot. He has reckless courage, keen eyesight, abounding health, contempt for the enemy, and fanatical belief in his cause. The Russians have a word they like to apply to themselves, Shirokaya Natura, meaning broad-natured, lavish-tempered. That is a characteristic of all the good pilots I have ever known. It means they are ready to spend themselves, their lives, as readily as they spend their money. The R.A.F. has it, Udet has it, Goering has it, the American and Canadian pilots have it, and the Russians have it. I dare say Lindbergh must have had it once. There are millions of boys in Russia of pilot age.

The fourth set of reasons for Russian resistance is based upon the immense benefit the Red Army won through the occupation of the Finnish Mannerheim line, the Baltic states, Eastern Poland, and Bessarabia during the time Hitler was busy conquering the rest of Europe. This action of Stalin’s was typical of the principle that the end justifies the means. If you believed in this principle and in the righteousness of the Soviet cause, you would now have to admit that the end did justify the means in this case, since the creation of this screen of territory enabled the Red Army to defeat the Blitz.

The term Blitzkrieg, frequently misused, technically means the destruction of your enemy by action so swift that he is not able to mobilize, or bring up his forces to meet yours at the decisive point. The screen of occupied territory slowed up the Germans long enough for the Red Army to mobilize fully. Thereafter the great distances, the bad roads, the unfavorable weather, and the scorched-earth policy impeded the German advance, while Russian guerilla warfare proved more effective than anything of the kind the Germans had ever met.

Russian guerilla fighting is not the old-fashioned kind, where a farmer hides with a shotgun to catch an enemy sentry with his back turned. During the Russian Civil War, the most ferocious conflict of modern times until its Spanish equivalent, the Reds especially developed Partisan warfare. This consisted in deliberately hiding companies of several score or hundred heavily armed men until the enemy passed forward. These guerillas would then attack from the rear, usually by night, and often annihilate whole detachments of the enemy. Their ambushes, ruses, and surprises were endlessly ingenious. The guerillas seldom wore uniforms. They were invariably shot if captured. They also never took prisoners except to obtain information by torture. They were extremely successful. Heretofore the Germans have been able to terrorize their conquered populations by the exercise of utterly ruthless Terror. They will have less success with the Russians than with any people they have yet tried to break, except perhaps the Serbs.

Q. But that is a very long list of reasons for Russian resistance. Can’t you sum them up for us in a word?

A. Yes, the answer is morale, or better, faith. That word with its deep Christian connotations may sound blasphemous when applied to the atheist Bolsheviks, but it is a true faith, in reverse, founded upon hatred. It may be objected that faith is a positive force and it may be asked in what do the Russians have faith? In their dogma, their doctrine, their nation, or faith in themselves, or the faith that lies in their deep attachment to their soil? Or is it not their faith in the unspeakably evil character of their enemies? I think it is the last. The Bolsheviks have taught all Russians to hate the Fascists, as they generically call the Nazis, with a ferocity which surpasses anything in our experience. This sort of faithful hatred is a terrific force. It inspires to limitless valor. It is a priceless asset in war. The Russians see the Nazi legions as the incarnation of wickedness, led by the devil himself. They are right. Furthermore they are inspired to fight by the belief, also correct, that if they lose they will suffer intolerable punishment. Unlike the French they have no illusions about the fate that awaits them at the hands of the man who has called them the “scum of the earth.”

This hatred of their enemies and fear of the consequences of defeat are probably the strongest feelings animating the Russians in battle, but they have also an incredible faith in themselves. It makes no difference that this faith is founded for the most part on lack of knowledge of the outside world, and the absence of any chance to compare themselves with other nations and other systems: they are unshakably convinced that they are what would have been called in another time and another place, “God’s anointed.” An American general defined morale as “when a soldier thinks his army is the best in the world, his regiment the best in the army, his company the best in the regiment, his squad the best in the company, and that he himself is the best blankety-blank soldier man in the outfit.” This is what the Red Army soldier thinks. The Red Army was not impressed by the German victory in France. After all, the defeated were “just Frenchmen, just bourgeoisie.”

The average Russian has a strong conviction, unspecified and unsupported by evidence, but forming a subconscious background for all his thinking about the war, that the citizens of the outside world, in “capitalist-imperialist” and “capitalist-fascist” states alike, are composed of two classes, depraved slave drivers and spiritless slaves. He even looks down on the proletariat abroad which has gone these twenty years without making the revolution the Russians made. It was a bitter revelation to many an American and other foreign Communist leader on visiting Moscow the first time, to be assigned a cubbyhole in the old Lux Hotel, and to be forced to wait hours for an audience with a Russian official who scarcely troubled to conceal his contempt for the inferior foreign communist.

We are surprised that the Russians, after all these years of starving and pain and suffering, should still possess the morale to fight, but we overlooked the fact that faith thrives on tribulation. The British had no faith and no morale until they were threatened with death and punished with fire. Today they have a faith in their cause such as they have not had since they became a nation, and now they announce they will scorch the earth, and if necessary burn London before the advance of an invader. Today the British are poor in food and clothes and lodgings, but rich in spirit. The Russians are likewise, and though it is painful to say it, so are the Germans. We alone among the nations are still rich in material goods and poor in spirit, for we lack faith. Where are those among us furious to fight for liberty and democracy?

Q. Do you mean to say the Russians have more faith in their cause than we do in ours?