The Midland Journal

GENERAL
JOHNSON
Says:
United Features
WNU Service

DANGERS PARADED
WASHINGTON, D. C.

A digest of those "thousands of telegrams" drawn by the President's Pan-American speech on Hitler's latest blitzkrieg would be valuable.

Ninety per cent of them were reported by Secretary Early to approve and the other 10 per cent to be from "peace-at-any-pricers." An analysis would be valuable because I can't see how you can approve a speech when you don't know what it means. I have discussed this speech with several informed people. They don't know what it means—and I don't.

From its condemnation of treacherous brutality of Hitler the approval should have been 100 per cent and also for its plea for pan-American unity in defense. This unity the President called "our solution."

But then he said: "Is this solution our solution—permanent or safe if it is solved for us alone? . . . I think not!"

What does that mean? It may seem a slight phrase to be quibbling about, but no utterance by a President of the United States on our future course in a world at war is a "slight" phrase. This one wasn't intended to be slight. It was coupled with an assertion that too many of us have been deceived by the "false teaching of geography" into feeling safe, "physically, economically and socially," from the impacts of attacks on civilization elsewhere. Then followed statements that, from the point of view of conquest, Santiago, Chile, is closer to Europe than Alexander found Macedonia to be from Persia or than the distance Caesar traveled from Rome to Spain—that is, four or five hours from Africa to South America as compared with four or five weeks it took the armies of Napoleon to go from Paris to Rome or Poland.

I don't know what that means but it sounds like "our frontier is in France." The statement identifying airplane timetables with the pace of conquering armies or from the point of view of conquest is utterly misleading—almost as misleading as it would be to say that the speed of a race horse compares with that of a telegram. An airplane can go from Africa to South America in a few hours. But an army can't. It can't go at all if our navy and air force are efficient and afloat and not chasing boogey-men in the east Pacific.

This aspect of the speech was cryptic obscuration coupled with sensational and misleading terrorism.

It creates an occasion to repeat the quotation from Lloyd George's speech that upset Chamberlain. "The nation is ready as long as its leadership is right, as long as you say clearly what you are aiming at, as long as you give confidence to them that their leaders are doing their best for them."

The President does the deliberate reverse of "saying clearly what he is aiming at." His carefully guarded exterior seems to be full to the bursting point with some kind of interior content he doesn't often reveal but every time a new pressure comes, a little of it squirts out—like "frontiers in France" and "quarantine the aggressors." The whole country is behind him at any cost or effort to prepare this country for defense of this continent. It is 90 per cent against any attempt at "defending" America by attacking in Europe or Asia—with either men, money or materials. It would be a political—as well as naval and military—catastrophe.

For, even for the relative strategical ease of continental defense, Mr. Roosevelt has not prepared the military and naval weapons to make good his position and the whole of recent history proves that bluffing on a bobtail is suicide.

FAT'S IN THE FIRE

The fat's in the fire and our navy is in Hawaii. Our miniature army is relatively equipped with bows and arrows. It is a pitiful Falstaffian insufficiency. We are quibbling about the design of a rifle already adopted and in production after years of experiment. It appears now that the navy has known the facts of its weakness against bombs from above, mines from below and secret foreign building programs for some time—without admission before the crisis.

Surely there was no ignorance in this government about the absolutely inefficient equipment of our army in almost everything needful for modern war and its own grotesque inadequacy.

Everybody is now squawking about our lack of tin and rubber and our failure of action in motorizing and mechanizing our army. This column has been squawking about it for five years. Seven years ago this writer had written into the Recovery act ample authority and appropriations to do all these things as a combination measure of re-employment, recovery and defense. That was the year Hitler started. It was the year that the administration gave most of that $3,300,000,000 to Hopkins for raking leaves.