World War II

“ In remembering the nightmare we now know as World War II, it is natural and fitting that we pause to mourn our loss. Eleven million service members-more than 400,000 of them American-perished in that war. ”

“ Most persons in this country, including all those who work for peace, agree with you in deploring the vast armaments which European States have been piling up, and will hope with you that after this war they may be reduced—and safely reduced—to slender dimensions. Their existence is a constant menace to peace. They foster that spirit of militarism which has brought these horrors on the world; for they create in the great countries of the Continent a large and powerful military and naval caste which lives for war, talks and writes incessantly of war, and glorifies war as a thing good in itself. ”

“ The battles of World War II raged fiercely on three continents, the onslaught of barbarity was nowhere decisively checked, the democratic nations feverishly tried to overcome their unprepared ness for a conflict of such dimensions. ”

“ What were the unseen and unnoted conditions that, within little more than a week’s time, induced all the leading nations of Europe to cast down the gage of battle and spring full-armed into the arena, bent upon a struggle which threatened to surpass any that the world had ever seen? ”

“ Twice in a single generation the catastrophe of world war has fallen upon us. Twice in our lifetime has the long arm of fate reached out across the oceans to bring the United States into the forefront of the battle. ”

“ The fact is more than our justification—it is our glory. If we had meant war, as Germany still hoarsely but more faintly says, week after week, to a world that listens no longer, could any nation of sane men have behaved as we did in the years before the war?—233,000 men on active service—and 263,000 Territorials, against Germany's millions!—with arsenals and equipment to match. ”

“ In concluding our survey of the nations and the stake of each country in the war, there is one reflection that must be obvious to all thinking men. This little fire of last August has become a world conflagration. The nation that first sent out her armies was Germany. There is a high-water mark of battle in every war, and after that, the invading waves begin their retreat. ”

“ In the giant warfare here described we behold a continent, well nigh a world, in arms. Along the rivers north of Paris three powerful nations, Germany, France and Britain, wrestled like mighty behemoths for supremacy. Far eastward, on the borders of Russia, Austria and Germany, two other great Powers, Russia and Austria, with German armies to aid the latter, strove with equal fury for victory. ”

“ This year on Veterans Day, we celebrate the 80th anniversary of the armistice that finally silenced the guns of World War I. Millions of brave Americans marched into Europe and into the brutality of trench warfare to fight that war. ”

“ The times we live in are anomalous to any that have ever preceded us. For some years there have been universal and active preparations for war, and almost universal peace. To secure the greatest efficiency of armed forces for defensive and offensive purposes, has been the prime consideration of government, especially so, as far as the Old World nations are concerned. Europe echoes to the tread of vast hosts of war while the nations are driven to their wits' end to provide for their support. ”

“ We were the final determining factor in winning the last World War, but more than any nation, even more than Nazi Germany, we have been responsible for losing the peace and bringing on the present world war. ”

“ It is clear to us that if Germany and Italy and Japan--or any one of them-- remain armed at the end of this war, or are permitted to rearm, they will again, and inevitably, embark upon an ambitious career of world conquest. They must be disarmed and kept disarmed, and they must abandon the philosophy, and the teaching of that philosophy, which has brought so much suffering to the world. ”

“ The Germans attacked in masses and successive waves, and paid the penalty of their desperate strategy. For though the British, and later the French, lines were bent backward for miles, and gaps were occasionally torn in them by the foe's furious attack, the Allied defensive withstood the onslaught and after a month of the most terrific struggle the world has ever seen, both British and French forces presented an unbroken front to the disappointed enemy. ”

“ Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940–41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory! ”

“ Here, again, as on previous occasions, the official German historians of the war will be able to correct the impression which their daily bulletins sought to create, and will tell an attentive world how the desperate courage of the invader broke on the final factor which no resources of science can permanently disguise—fighting men’s physical exhaustion. ”

“ Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!
You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
Your task will not be an easy one. ”

“ Infantry, artillery, machine-guns, and other branches of the service were awaiting the resumption of the great German drive, by which the enemy were hoping to obtain a victorious decision and give to their brutal government supremacy in the world. ”

“ For the first time in our history our troops have been sent to fight on another continent. Many persons have felt that we should keep our young men at home and wait for Germany to cross the Atlantic in order to attack us. Our statesmen, on the other hand, saw that the peace of the world was at stake. ”

“ The fact that Germany began the slaughter of babies and women in defiance of the rules of war, and has kept it up in frequent raids by warships, Zeppelins, and aeroplanes, whereas the Allies have very seldom attacked open towns, and then only as occasional reprisals following peculiarly barbarous German attacks, has won for Germany the condemnation, and for the Allies the commendation of the civilised world. ”

“ ALL wars bring their full measure of miseries and misfortunes, and this world war, initiated by Germany for the purpose of imposing a military domination upon Europe and America, and conducted with methods which combine the barbaric standards of the Huns and Mongols with the skilled mechanism of the twentieth century, has brought upon the world miseries that can hardly be estimated or described. ”

“ The American army can give the finishing touch to the German downfall along the western front, and the sooner the Germans realize that they cannot win from the rapidly growing number of their enemies, the sooner will come the the end of this greatest tragedy in the civilized world. ”

“ America speaks for the world in fighting Germany. Mark on a map those countries which are Germany's allies, and you will mark but four, running from the Baltic through Austria and Bulgaria to Turkey. All the other nations, the whole globe around, are in arms against her or are unable to move. ”

“ The allied and associated Governments affirm, and Germany accepts, the responsibility of herself and her allies, for causing all the loss and damage to which the allied and associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies. ”

“ If it had been simple war, shell and machine gun, probably fifty per cent or more of the devastation would have been saved. But the German makes war against an entire country, inanimate as well as animate. ”

“ With two-thirds of the world, representing more than twenty nations, already dragged into the widening vortex of the present war; with more than five millions of the finest youth of Europe already slaughtered on the battlefield, with twenty millions who have already been wounded, nearly forty millions under arms, and whole nations organized for war and the manufacture of munitions; with the flood tide of impurity and immorality which war has brought in its train ”

“ In most Entente circles it became more and more a matter of conviction that the military masters of Germany had forced this war on a world wholly unprepared for it, in confident reliance upon a great national delusion, among Germans, due to a generation of systematic teaching in homes, schools and public life, that Germany out there alone in Central Europe, was surrounded by a world of enemies, and that, to save her national existence, she had reached a point where she had to fight. ”

“ Such is the situation of Germany confronting a France who keeps her credit intact and her ports open, who procures provisions and ammunition according to her need, who reinforces her army with all that her Al{153}lies bring to her, and who can count—since her cause is that of humanity itself—upon the increasingly active sympathy of the civilized world. ”

“ Here, then, we come within sight of the first of the conditions which are absolutely precedent, at least so far as America is concerned, to any discussion of peace.
1. Germany must answer President Wilson's note of December 18, 1916. She must state her terms of peace, maximum or minimum, frankly and unequivocally.
Germany asserts that she is waging a defensive war. She must tell the world what she is defending. That she has never been willing to do. ”

“ These causes may be given under two heads: (1) the war waged upon us by submarines; and (2) the German plots and threats against our country at a time when we were at peace with them. The latter, as given in pages to follow, comprise: (a) The Kaiser’s threat, (b) Admiral Von Tirpitz’s threat, (c) the blowing up of American factories and death of American workingmen, (d) the attempt to get us into war with Japan and Mexico, and (e) the spending of the German government’s money in an attempt to make our congressmen vote as Germany wished. ”

“ It must be remembered in the third place that we are an insular nation, wholly dependent upon sea-borne supplies, possessing no considerable army, either for home defense or foreign service, and compelled therefore to play for very unequal stakes should Germany be our opponent in the hazardous game of war. ”

“ It is unlikely that they can be achieved by peaceful means. The decision to make Germany a world power, therefore, forces upon us the necessity of making the corresponding preparations for war.
“3. War against England means at the same time war against the Empire, against France, probably against Russia as well, and a large number of countries overseas, in fact, against one-third to one-half of the world. ”

“ Individual Initiative as Against Mass Movements—Trench Warfare a Game of Hide and Seek—Rats and Disease—Surgery's Triumphs—Changed Tactics—Italian Mountain Fighting.
Warfare such as carried on in the Great World War is so different from that of any other of the great wars which the world has seen, that it might be described as a method of fighting distinctively unique. Undoubtedly, more ancient methods, and even ancient weapons, have been employed than were used in any of the wars which have changed, from time to time, the boundary lines of nations. ”

“ Hitherto Allied policy and Allied war aims have been defined too loosely to be comprehensible to the Germans.
"The real war aim of the Allies is not only to beat the enemy, but to establish a world peace that shall preclude the resumption of war. Successful propaganda in Germany presupposes the clear definition of the kind of world-settlement which the Allies are determined to secure and the place of Germany in it. ”

“ Let no one forget for a moment that the present war, certainly NATIONAL so far as the existence of each one of the Allied States is concerned, is, above all preeminently a world's conflict which favourable [399] issue deeply concerns the destinies of all the peoples of the earthly globe. ”

“ My countrymen, the surpassing war of all times has involved us, and found us utterly unprepared in either a mental or military sense. The Republic must awaken. The people must understand. Our safety lies in full realization the fate of the nation and the safety of the world will be decided on the western battlefront of Europe. ”

“ America Transformed by War WHEN Germany threw down the gauge of battle to the civilized world, the German High Command calculated that the long, rigorous and thorough military training to which every male German had submitted, would make a military force invincible in the field. ”

“ The first three years after the world war provided terrible proofs of the disaster which had happened to humanity in that deadly struggle. Those who wish to convince the future generations of the devastating effect of modern warfare upon highly organised nations, as a frightful warning, must summon up the picture of Europe in 1919, 1920 and 1921. ”

“ What I am pointing out now is that whether we fight Germany or not, a time is drawing near when Germany will cease to be our war objective and we shall cease to be Germany's war objective, and when there will have to be a complete revision of our military and naval equipment in relation to those remoter, vaster Asiatic possibilities. ”

“ Wherever there was distress among our allies, German intervention, often with weak forces, always restored the situation and often won noteworthy successes. Germans fought on all the battlefields of the far-flung World War. ”

“ The year 1915 was one of meager results, the advantages remaining on the side of the Central Powers, with this understanding, however: The Allies were growing stronger because Great Britain was making rapid progress in marshaling her resources for war. ”