INVITATION TO THE GOOSESTEP
Meyer, Ernest L.
Invitation To The Goosestep By ERNEST L. MEYER POWERFUL voices, including that of the President himself, are being raised in behalf of a system of postwar compulsory military training for American...
...The peace of Switzerland has been the reward of her preparedness...
...Fortunately there is such a system, long established and efficiently functioning in one of the real democracies of the world, as the Hearst newspapers have often noted in the past...
...America in 1942 started from scratch, or almost from scratch...
...Only recently the Bank for International Settlements, with Germans, Yanks, and British seated at the board, did its business as usual in the security of Geneva...
...Old Arguments Fall It takes no military expert to spot this argument as utter moonshine...
...Keynote of most of the pleas is that a peacetime draft helps to insure peace...
...It is the successful and democratic Swiss system...
...They needed Switzerland as a sort of safety island in a stream of mad traffic...
...It seems obvious that in modern war a vast standing army is no guarantee whatever of victory...
...And how has the Allied miracle been accomplished...
...But neither the Germans nor the Allies were interested in such annihilation...
...Often the arguments for peacetime conscription reach fantastic limits...
...Switzerland has been spared not because it is a citadel of a democratic army, but because it is a sanctuary for the tradesmen, the politicians, and the spies of a continent at war...
...Hitler's huge standing army must remain a standing army, lacking means of maneuver...
...Invitation To The Goosestep By ERNEST L. MEYER POWERFUL voices, including that of the President himself, are being raised in behalf of a system of postwar compulsory military training for American youth...
...Peacetime conscription and huge standing armies are a silly, empty invitation to the goosestep...
...Knickerbocker says: "One of the most popular views of the reasons for the German collapse is that it was based chiefly on the failure of their transportation system, and this goes back to the loss of their gasoline supplies...
...History, of course, proves that the reverse is true: that periods of frantic piling up of armaments have been followed by seasons of disastrous wars...
...The defenses of Switzerland could have been blasted off the map'by either of the contestants in this war...
...It would still mean that a power or a combination of powers with the greatest natural and indusrtial resources could launch and win a war...
...More and more, as the military picture unfolds in this war, the old arguments for a large peacetime standing army fall by the wayside...
...Complete, world-wide disarmament might not mean a millennium of peace...
...The shift from militarism to mobilization requires but the press of a button, and in every nation bursting with the shining new tools of war there is always a maniac's hand itching for the task...
...Yet we had vast untapped resources and an industrial plant capable of tremendous expansion...
...Until the Germans lost their transport, they fought extremely skilfully and bravely, as in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, but, beginning with Normandy, they suffered from what began as a grave deterioriation and ended as a complete collapse of their service of supply...
...that a prepared nation is not as likely to be attacked as an unprepared nation, and that, in other words, militarism by some weird magic is a safeguard against militarism...
...The safety of Switzerland has unquestionably been in the preparedness of her people...
...The ruts and the roads of France and Russia and Italy and Belgium and Holland are littered with the ruins of that proud army, and the mad paperhanger now cringes behind the west wall, which, too, will inevitably fall...
...Long before we entered the war we began, through Lend-Lease, to make the armies of Britain and Russia and China modern and mobile...
...What they lacked was not manpower, but machine power—and food and oil and medical supplies...
...The present war illustrated again, as in the last when the Kaiser's great army succumbed to attrition, that manpower alone can never win in modern mechanized warfare...
...The Germans and the Allies, in this war as in the last, need Switzerland as a neutral clearing house for business and banking which goes on eternally, war or no war...
...Among them is one by correspondent H. R. Knickerbocker, written for the Field Publications...
...With this system, the democracy of Switzerland has kept out of the two greatest wars in history which have raged all around her—while the democracy of the United States has been drawn into both of these wars, although remote from them...
...Recently, for example, the Hearst press printed this editorial gem: "What the American people truly and wisely want and need is a constructive and wholesome and democratic system of military training for all youth...
...When Hitler lost his reservoirs of oil, he lost the war...
...Hitler, when he launched his series of blitzes, had a military machine unequalled in size and equipment in all history...
...No Guarantee Of Victory What this means is that the crushing defeats of the Nazis was caused by lack of materials rather than by lack of men...
...But it would mean also, in the interludes of peace, that we would not be saddled with a huge and costly military establishment all set and poised to be hurled into action by another maniac touching a button...
...There are a number of reasons advanced...
...And the means of maneuver can be supplied best by the country with the greatest natural resources and the greatest industrial equipment to exploit the natural resources...
Vol. 8 • September 1944 • No. 38
