How Far From Fighting

WAR & PEACE

A Gallup poll this week reported that 17% of the voters favored having the U. S. enter World War II. This was a smaller pro-war minority than there was last June when France fell (19%), but it had grown since July, when it was down to 15%. More significantly, willingness to fight if need be had grown more rapidly than eagerness to fight. Whereas in May only 36% of the voters thought aid to Britain more important than avoiding all risk of war, in September the number willing to take that chance had risen to 52%.

With this change in sentiment has grown a feeling that, willy-nilly, the U. S. will not long stay out--the same belief which swept the U. S. in 1939 when World War II broke out, this time not quite so apathetic but just as fatalistic. In Washington men spoke of "when the U. S. is at war," talked of the date--in two months, four months, six months. Many Congressmen unwillingly shared the belief. Elsewhere, although many people did not want to admit it even to themselves, men began to act on the assumption that the U. S. would soon be at war.

If this gloomy foreboding was right, last week's events indicated where it might be fulfilled. The State Department told 16,883 U. S. citizens living in the Orient to come home. Even businessmen began to face the possibility of war with Japan.

Although the President conferred with Secretary Hull, with Admiral Richardson, Commander in Chief of the U. S. Fleet, with C. V. Whitney, chairman of the board of Pan American Airways (just returned from an air tour of the Pacific), the tension in the East was not as great as it sounded in the press. The Japanese hastily piped down their war talk and one-third of the U. S. Fleet idled in California harbors, giving long overdue shore leave to its sailors. But the fundamental crisis in the East was building up to a decision that could not be indefinitely postponed. There were only three possible outcomes:

1) That Japan give up her plans to gobble up the East Indies.

2) That the U. S. let Japan have her way.

3) That the U. S. and Japan fight.

For the State Department this situation posed a knotty problem in foreign policy. Wholly aside from what war would cost the U. S. in human suffering, in economic and political sacrifice, there were other excellent reasons for not fighting Japan. Foremost of these was the fact that there is a war going on in Europe whose outcome may imperil the security of the U. S. far more than Japan's seizure of the Indies.

If the U. S. should divert aid from Britain to a war effort of its own in the Pacific, it might lose the big war while winning a little one. (There would be less likelihood of the diversion of such aid if Germany and Italy declared war on the U. S.--so it could probably be assumed that the Axis would not keep its promise of backing up Japan.) Hitler may well have made the recent tripartite treaty with Japan just to get the U. S. embroiled in the Pacific. And if Britain should go down, the U. S. would be in an unfortunate position, facing a hostile Europe while fighting in the Orient.

But if the U. S. had good reasons for avoiding war with Japan, it had equally good reasons for not letting Japan snap up the Indies. This would mean abandoning China, the one nation friendly to the U. S. in the Orient. It would also mean letting Japan gain control of the rubber and tin on which the U. S. is dependent. Eventually the U. S. can probably get adequate supplies of rubber and tin from South America, can develop its own synthetic rubber--but not for five or ten years, and U. S. defense efforts would be gravely handicapped if a war had to be fought in the meantime.

More important than these considerations was the fact that the war in the East is an integral part of the war in Europe. If it is important for the U. S. not to have Britain lose World War II, Japan must not be allowed to cause Britain's defeat. Britain's war effort cannot long continue in Europe if Japan seizes the rubber and tin of the Indies. Furthermore, if Japan conquers or occupies British possessions in the Orient, Britain's empire resources will be reduced to those of her own battered little island, plus the very little help she gets from Canada and South Africa. So to allow Japan to have her way in the Orient would probably have about the same effect on the war in Europe as withdrawing U. S. aid from Britain.

For the U. S., therefore, the only satisfactory solution in the Far East is to have Japan back down. To get this result the U. S. must be firm with Japan--as it was last week, with good results. But in being firm the U. S. runs the definite risk of war, if hotheads of the Japanese Army and Navy decide to fight. In that event the U. S. will have to face the practical problem of fighting in the Pacific, and those who sombrely predict that the U. S. will find itself at war will be proved right.

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