Fear Crosses The Atlantic

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 49, 31 May 1940, Page 12

Fear Crosses The Atlantic

HE most sensational result of the Ger5 invasion of the Lowlands was not the speedy capitulation of Holland, nor the loud whoops from Italy, but the alarm, rising in places to panic, in the United States. Some of it was, of course, political, and much of it .stage-managed by the fighting services, but a great deal of it was real. In spite of their numbers, wealth, remoteness and industrial efficienty, Americans felt suddenly afraid. ~ Fear may, of course, be misplaced. There are people in New Zealand who ask themselves, every time they see a strange ship enter port, if it is friendly or hostile. They are the people who saw German ’planes hovering over the Dominion in 1914, and are not normal. America has them, too, and some of them own newspapers. But the people who came suddenly into the news when Rotterdam fell, included tough old warriors like General Pershing. They sit in Congress and they have contacts: with generals and admirals. They go to Europe. They have talked with kings. Yet they are afraid. They have seen space vanish and decency die. They know, now, that the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong, and that they are neither swift nor strong. They lack experience on the sea, they are years behind schedule in the air, they are weaker on land than Belgium or Finland. If the Allies fell, the enemy would be at the gate. For neutrality has suddenly become nonsense. You may resist a thug, or you may run away from him, but you cannot, unless you are a thug yourself, retain an open mind about him. The: excitement in the United States means that Americans have closed their minds but realise painfully that they still have open coasts. It is a depressing ‘spectacle, but one that we have all seen before, and no one needs to be told what the moral is.