THE BOMB KILLS THE BILL
Holmes, John Haynes
The Bomb Kills The Bill By JOHN HAYNES HOLMES WELL, the peacetime military conscription bill is dead—as dead as last year's poison ivy. Killed, like so many other things, by the sudden ending of...
...Somewhere it must be found, and everywhere it will be sought...
...With a suddenness and a completeness that have surprised us all, and must have fairly staggered these careful planners for the enslavement of the republic, the Japanese are beaten to their knees...
...Voters are eager to back up every proposal for strengthening the armed forces...
...Around these splendid figures was organized the whole strategy of medieval war...
...With what grace can any loyal patriot refuse the request, or recommendation, of these men who alone understand the urgency of the battle...
...It can no more be revived than the victims of the bomb in Hiroshima...
...What the military want they should have...
...The chief argument for postwar military aonscription was that we needed armies to implement the San Francisco Charter...
...Millions of trained fighting men, ranked among the best soldiers in the world, were prepared to resist the American forces to the last ditch...
...But we must not imagine that the conscriptors will concede this point...
...Airpower, armed with this terrific missile, has won out...
...It was clever, and might have been successful, especially if the struggle against Japan had dragged on, or the losses been great...
...War is still the same, they will say...
...More, far more, was destroyed when that bomb fell than Hiroshima...
...But now it is over...
...But they will soon fade away, and at last be still...
...The infantry has always been the central force of every military machine...
...The only danger is the fear that the atomic bomb has itself engendered...
...Then suddenly appeared an explosive that-fired a bullet that penetrated steel...
...Those armies had scarcely been engaged at all...
...If we are going to make any mistake, let it be on the side of complete preparedness, they say...
...So the conspirators, plotting their strategy for overcoming the native instinct of the American people to resist every incipient form of militarism, shrewdly planned a campaign to enact postwar military conscription before the postwar period had come...
...They remembered what happened after the last war when a modest proposal for the continuance of selective service led to a public uprising which buried the bill deeper than Davy Jones's locker...
...What is this bomb going to do to us and to the world...
...As there was the day of the bow and arrow, and of the sword, and of gunpowder, so now there is the day of the atomic bomb...
...Citizens are ready to support anything that has the appearance of safe-guarding the interests of the nation...
...Armies fit as incongruously into this age as ox-carts into the age of the aeroplane, or flint and steel into the age of electricity...
...It is now a thousand-fold ridiculous with the atomic horror in allied hands...
...Ordinarily, fear ends when "the trumpets sing truce...
...From the days of Epaminondas to the present hour, it is infantry maneuvers which have turned the tide of battle...
...But a little intelligence should silence them...
...Mitchell's day, scoffed at the new-born aeroplane...
...But this peace has come as no other peace has come in the history of mankind...
...But the real blow against postwar military conscription was, struck by the atomic bomb...
...IN wartime, in other words, everything is loaded in favor of conscription both new and in the future...
...The atomic bomb has created the atomic age...
...What had happened...
...What they could have done in protecting their homeland from invasion, was shown in the fearful bloodshed on Okinawa...
...Where is there protection against this menace...
...Of what use were the Mikado's armies when Hiroshima was in an instant turned to dust...
...We shall need armies, as we have always needed them...
...Armies will disappear, except as police and occupying forces...
...Armies, navies, forts—the sheer momentum of the past may keep them going in the face of the new and incalculable fear that now confronts us...
...The charge wi)th lance in rest was the decisive moment of victory and defeat...
...THIS is throne chance the conscription conspirators now have—to exploit this new fear...
...When the communiques are coming in, and the casualty lists are being published, and the enemy is sinking ships and taking prisoners, men and women do not think—they only feel...
...And the mounted knight, with shield and sword and spear, went rolling in the dust...
...The English scientific expert who helped to produce this horror says that, in less than five years, the secret will be universally known...
...So with armies—and navies, for that matter!—in this terrific day of the atomic bomb..Of what use is an army when the skies may now rain down this "ghastly dew" of bombs powerful enough to extinguish entire cities...
...This ia one of them...
...These military and civilian conspirators knew perfectly well that the American people have no use for conscription—that they consent to it only under the dreadful hazard of war...
...It is impossible to exaggerate the reliance the proponents of the conscription measure were placing upon this pressure...
...So we still have a fight on our hands...
...The "Big Three," now the dictatorial masters of the world, need only a supply of this latest bomb to remain supreme...
...The peacetime conscription bill is dead...
...The war, the Japanese empire, civilization as we know it, the moral law as we recognize and reverence it— these were in an instant annihilated...
...This argument was always ridiculous in the light of B-29s...
...Killed, like so many other things, by the sudden ending of the war...
...The very air we breathe is unfavorable even to the discussion of any proposal having to do with arms...
...Not for a moment...
...So armies are as useless as chain-armor, and conscription as obsolete as chivalry...
...Then, in an instant, so to speak, these vast and far flung armies were ordered to surrender...
...They knew that, once this hazard was removed, consent would change into bitter opposition, or, at the best, into indifference...
...Thus, the emergency pressure for the instant passing of the bill is totally relaxed...
...But it should be an easy fight...
...And conscription in any form is dead...
...When Congress comes together, they will act as though nothing had happened at all...
...THIS was the end of armies, and of navies, and of all accepted military methods...
...A single bomb had been discovered which rendered the myriads of soldiers as helpless as a nest of ants beneath a crunching foot...
...For a little while the advocates of postwar military conscription will sing the old song, and jangle the old fears...
...It takes no impressive oversupply of brains to see this...
...If they were to achieve anything this time, it must be while the war was on— while our boys were still fighting and dying at the front...
...Their feelings run all the way from disgust and anger to vengeance, hatred, and secret fears...
...And so these fanatics will continue to plump for conscription, just as though the most tremendous event since Vulcan forged the first thunder-bolts of Jove had never occurred at all...
...Which means that man will be tempted to cling to every form of armed force, no matter how much outmoded it is...
...They will scoff at the new weapon, just as the Army and Navy, in the gallant Gen...
...And so was the whole military system of these times...
...They will be as contemptuous of the atomic bomb as the knights of old were at first contemptuous of the despised musketeers who were mere plehians on foot...
...When gunpowder was invented in the Middle Ages, it rendered obsolete and useless the knights in armor who had for so long dominated the field of battle...
...There are some things that are done so effectually that they do not have to be done again...
Vol. 9 • August 1945 • No. 35
