Mexborough & Swinton Times – Saturday 01 November 1941
Hitler v Roosevelt
President Roosevelt’s Navy Day speech was a declaration of undeclared war
“The shooting has started,” he said. “We know who fired the first shot but it is more important to ensure that we fire the last.” All the same, to use an Americanism, “it’s a long time between drinks,” and the “American war” moves haltingly from one Roosevelt speech to the next. The United States citizens are being psychologically prepared, but by the standards of those with whom they will have to fight, they are not yet in fighting shape. It may not be true that they are flabby and lazy; it may well be that the modern “American” is true to the breed which settled and colonised that continent, overcoming that resistance of “uncharted seas, wild forests, desert plains, raging floods and withering drought.”
Hitler, however, wars not with individuals but with nations, and the United States is not yet a nation organised for war. Though Axis newspapers, with unconscious irony rage at Roosevelt as a “dictator,” his power to translate his will into deeds is as nothing to the power of Hitler and Mussolini. While he is warning his people that they must “stop Hitler” now, and reminding them that Nazis have killed in one attack the sons of twelve American States, he appeals in vain to the American Labour leader, Lewis, to allow coal miners to work so that steel production needed for the American defence programme may go forward.
While he pledges aid to Britain and Russia, and is applauded for it by eight Americans out of nine, the isolationists and labour agitators do the work of Hitler as surely as if they already held his commission. When we think of the massive inertia, the enormous gap between words and deeds, which President Roosevelt has to overcome we are lost in wonder and admiration at his skill, patience, and pertinacity, and in gratitude for it.
Hitler and Roosevelt are playing a tremendous game to decide, not whether America shall be kept out of the war, but whether her entry can be effected soon enough or long enough. For all its ridiculous rodomontade, the new Japanese Government is afraid to venture against the United States and Britain while Russia lives. That being so, Hitler must keep the Americans out until he has reached a decision in the East. This is cramping the U-boat campaign and giving us temporary ease in the Atlantic, but even Hitler cannot have everything, and he cannot fly at the American supply line with all-in Teutonic fury until he has given Russia the quietus and Japan the courage to turn squeaks into acts. “One by one.’ The isolationists of America are conforming perfectly to this hackneyed but never-failing Hitler gambit. They are supplying the heavy narcotic doses needed to keep the United States quiet. Sooner or later, in his own time, if he is allowed to, Hitler will strike at the heart of America—sooner or later the later the better, for him. But he is wrestling for the soul of America with a subtle and powerful adversary, who has already wrought with astonishing effect against him, and will assuredly win this battle of brains and wills.