AMERICAN HESITATION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 July 1941, Page 6

AMERICAN HESITATION

RELATION TO EUROPEAN EVENTS

In discussing the hesitation of the United States, Mr Erwin D. Canham writes from New York: —First of all it must be remembered that Germany has as yet made no direct attack upon Americans or their tangible interests. The general Nazi threat to all American values is entirely palpable. But American ships and citizens have not been attacked, as they were in 1917, and we Americans do not have the same obligation toward any European Power that Britain had toward Poland. The reasons which might impel Americans toward war, or what is now called “shooting war,” may be enormously powerful, but they are not direct ana immediate. Some events are automatic cases of war. None of them has yet been perpetrated against us by Germany, Italy or Japan. In such circumstances it would take deep moral conviction to have brought us into the actual fighting at an earlier date, and it is by no means clear that we are ready to enter the actual fighting yet. The circumstances which generally bring nations to war have not yet obtained overtly in our case. We shall probably get into “shooting war,” but there may well never be any overt provocation.' Thus our entry will be historically remarkable, and Britishers should understand how this situation now delays American action. Second until quite recently Americans were tcld by their own leaders and by Allied spokesmen that it would not be necessary for them to get into “shooting war.” The slogan of our recent election was “aid short of war.” Mr Churchill

told us eloquently: “Give us the tools and we will finish the job.” In the absence of overt provocation by Germany, it is all the more difficult to get Americans out of their “short of war”, conviction.