"We Have a Cause Now"

The accompanying article was sent [to] us by a Princeton alumnus who was drafted a year ago and has recently been named for Officers’ Training School. Everyone is interested in what the young soldier thinks. Here is an honest statement by one who, we believe, reflects the average draftee’s point of view.

Everybody thinks he knows what’s wrong with the Army; everybody thinks he knows perfectly well that if the measures he recommends ever came to the attention of General Marshall, or perhaps one of his aides, not only would the country be saved from the “frightful fate” held in store for it by “those dirty [redacted for inappropriate language]” but he, himself, would become a national hero. The men aren’t paid enough (or perhaps, if it’s your pocket their pay comes out of, they’re paid too much); they work too hard they don’t work hard enough; they don’t get enough leave; they get a bloody sight too much leave — just look at Pearl Harbor. Well, let’s not go on. These are petty grievances, and everyone cherishes one or several of them. In the larger view, in the field of Grand Strategy, there are also plenty of ideas about What’s Wrong With the Army. We’re fighting the Civil War all over again; or, on the contrary, the young whippersnappers who are running things today are so damned radical that they’ve forgotten all the important lessons we have learned in the past.

All these minutiae are unimportant in themselves. It doesn’t make much difference what faults in the Army setup the individual may feel competent to point out; the fact that stands out most boldly and clearly is that there is not one man in a thousand who doesn’t feel that there is something wrong, and that if They Would Only Listen to Him, everything could be set to rights with a minimum of effort and a maximum of splendid results. That, I submit, is what is wrong with the Army: and it is also what is wrong with the nation as a whole. Since the outbreak of the European division of this world conflagration American policy has been almost as much of a mystery to Americans as Japanese policy: and a darned sight less consistent. It would be nice to blame it all on the Government (where, undoubtedly, much of the blame belongs), but somehow or other we can’t help wondering if the government of any people doesn’t do pretty much what those people want. Certainly the policies of Mr. Roosevelt were given the endorsement of a clear plurality of voters in November 1940. 

Most of us are conscious that since the very beginning we have been the victims of varying degrees of evasion, self-evasion or otherwise. Our policy has been to tell ourselves one thing and to do another: or worse, to try to fool ourselves into thinking we could be allowed to go on indefinitely making the decision as to what constitutes a step “short of war.” We are not prepared to face the fact that in order to preserve certain things we felt were worth preserving, in order to adopt courses we felt to be desirable, we had to be prepared to defend our actions and our beliefs against the powers who were certainly prepared to challenge them.

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Few will doubt, I think, that the only reason we were not in this war long ago is the fact that our present enemies were not prepared before to tackle the rather formidable task of defeating one of the largest, richest and strongest nations in the world. It wasn’t because we had done nothing to provoke their attack; indeed, it may be suspected that on strictly legalistic grounds history may even decide that we did enough to justify it. It wasn’t a step short of war when, by passing the Lease-Lend bill, we declared to all the world that we intended to contribute our full strength to insuring a British victory over Germany. It wasn’t a step short of war when we declared that we would “shoot first” on any Axis ship of war that attempted to interfere with the shipment of the weapons intended for use against themselves. 

In short, we declared war fully a year ago: but we weren’t willing to admit it, even to ourselves. I am not concerned with the pros and cons of our actions; I am very much concerned with our own ostrich-like attitude toward them. It is that attitude which led more than any other one thing to our puerile belief that we could fight a war without paying the cost; that belief, in its turn, has led to the terrifying conclusion which has so long existed in this country.

We wouldn’t make the sacrifices essential to a full war-time economy,  because we wouldn’t allow ourselves to believe they were necessary: not because we were selfish, as many governmental administrators are now wildly screaming. We wanted to be able to buy all the cars, the tires, the gasoline, the aluminum products, that we wanted; because we felt that the ability to buy these things was certain proof that we weren’t going to have to fight. The men called by the Selective Service Act were resentful, because no one could make them believe in the possibility of an actual hostile invasion of the continental United States and because everyone in authority told him with every breath that, however, much we loathed the Axis, there wasn’t the slightest chance that we would ever fight the Axis on its own or neighboring soil.

In other word, as has already been said, we acted one way and talked and felt another. And, being psychologically unable to talk or think about the true issues involved in various aspects of our preparedness campaign, we had to talk ourselves silly about trivia. It would be swell if our privates could be paid forty, or fifty, dollars a month instead of twenty-one. But the amount of the pay, as long as it meets minimum requirements (and rest assured, it does), has little bearing on the effectiveness of the individual as a fighting unit. More important is the lack of equipment, which has been understood and deplored by everyone concerned. 

Before December 7 we railed and ranted at the unpatriotic behavior of defense strikers; but their willingness to sabotage production was again a product of the general national unwillingness of the country to face the true gravity of the situation. It’s too bad that their unwillingness should have had such especially grave results; but it is neither surprising nor especially blamable. It wasn’t easy for these men to make the sacrifices demanded of “production soldiers” while the rest of the civilian population — and especially their employers — were just comfortably reaping the profits. No one dared to tell them the true importance of their work, for no one was willing to face the fact that we were rapidly approaching a state of total, all-out war. It is significant that little labor trouble has been observed since the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

In short, the will to work has been conspicuously lacking from all our preparations for the war that we have now had forced upon us. We didn’t want war, and we hated to do anything which would have convinced us that we were going to have to fight one. That’s what’s wrong with the Army, and that’s what’s wrong with the country. “A cause, a cause; our nation for a cause” — to paraphrase rather wretchedly. We have a cause now; we could never have hoped for a better one. I think it will be seen that it makes a difference. 

This article was originally published in the January 30, 1942 issue of PAW.