THE EDITOR RESERVES THE LAST COLUMN
The Editor Reserves . . . The Last Column AMERICA'S GI Joes in Europe have at last been nominated for an assignment worthy of their prodigious talents—to win a critical phase of the peace even as...
...He doesn't set an impossible goal of perfection...
...Gannett found nothing to support romantic or sentimental nonsense about the Germans...
...Cohen was "ready to sock the first German who spit on me...
...Gannett, like so many of us, has been brooding about "the German problem," wondering how to deal with the German nation and the German people when the war ends...
...Who is advising Gen...
...They had no sense of guilt, and no indignation...
...His assignment for the American doughboys is simplicity itself—turn them loose, with their friendly smiles, their winning ways, and their love of life to "startle, puzzle, and possibly convert Allied and enemy countries" to the ways of peace and democracy...
...They hadn't the remotest notion of national sin...
...Gannett finds his encouragement in the simple common sense of the ordinary soldier...
...American soldiers have now been ordered not to fraternize with the Germans in Germany...
...Eisenhower not to trust the men of Allied armies ? And why ? The friendly GI is the best propagandist America ever had or can have...
...Gannett's suggestion, so simple and so sound that it will be pooh-poohed as "frivolous" by the hate cult, appears in a thoughtful article entitled "The German Soldier" published a fortnight ago in the Nation...
...He may not call it 'fraternizing," but he will find a way to communicate with the human animals about him, wherever he is, even in Germany...
...Most of us remember the stories in the American and British press of a month or two ago about how the GI Joes who were among the first to fight their way across the border into the Reich failed to find horns on the people of Germany...
...But unlike the cocksure exponents of a policy of revenge and dismemberment, who do their investigating in the New York night clubs, Gannett knows that "peace is a process, not a formula," that there is no easy answer, that hate and revenge are treacherous and explosive...
...His friendliness is a force of nature, like the tides and the sunshine, and second only to his bump of curiosity...
...instead of stiff-necked arrogance, he found timidity.- As a result he was ready to junk the theory of "mass punishment of the German people" which had been sold him by the Country Club colonels...
...They followed...
...They were sheep...
...I'm so taken with Gannett's suggestion that I'd almost favor—since I'm not a candidate for President —leaving our GI Joe's in Europe for a while after they crushed the Nazi Army—IF they could be turned loose to be their winning selves, and not hated police guarding a peace of hate...
...And why not...
...They don't subscribe to any racial or national theories, Jew-baiting or Hun-hating...
...only in that sense did they feel that Germany had done wrong...
...No Racial Theories . Gannett is no believer in a "soft peace," whatever that is...
...He searched for the answer in war-ravaged France, among the captured German soldiers whom he questioned patiently for days...
...This order, Gannett rightly fears, "smacks subtly of Hitler's own racial laws against association with people of another 'race,' the Jews...
...There was S/Sgt...
...The nomination comes from a front-rank American journalist, Lewis Gannett, who is a crack book reviewer currently on leave as a war cor...
...Nathan Cohen of the Bronx, whom Milton Mayer wrote about-in The Progressive...
...Mr...
...respondent for the New York Herald Tribune...
...The GI's are curiously encouraging...
...S/Sgt...
...They may be politically insulated, a bit lawless, and monstrously homesick, but they are the most heart-warming human specimens ever let loose to startle, puzzle, and possibly convert Allied and enemy countries...
...The Editor Reserves . . . The Last Column AMERICA'S GI Joes in Europe have at last been nominated for an assignment worthy of their prodigious talents—to win a critical phase of the peace even as they are knee-deep in their number one job of winning the war...
...They knew that Germany had been beaten...
...They do what they have to do at the moment, and treat individuals as individuals...
...But instead of spit, he found tears...
...An Order On Hitler's Style In the long run, Gannett feels, the only possibility of "converting" or "reeducating" Germany toward "our conception of a peaceful, evolving, democratic world lies in a continuing demonstration that ours is a decen-ter civilization...
...But there is no force on earth which can stop an American GI—or, I imagine, a British Tommy—from playing with the kids he sees on the streets, regardless of their nationality, and the GI just naturally smiles at girls, whether mademoiselles, senoritas, colleens, lassies, or frauleins...
...The appearance of such stories frightened the hate cult into action, it seems...
...We want, as I see it, to instill into the German something of the GI's skeptical attitude toward prohibitions and dicta from on high—• which is a bit difficult under military rule...
...We want the Germans to become the kind of human beings German-Americans have become in our own friendly Middle West...
...M.H.R...
...They fight hard and fraternize brilliantly...
...He knows that the proeess of reeducating Germany "is colossal and baffling," but this doesn't frighten him into running for cover...
Vol. 8 • November 1944 • No. 45
