Show GENERAL HUGH S 4 JOHNSON owr V vav DANGERS PARADED PARADE D washington D 0 A digest of those thousands of telegrams drawn by the presidents pan american speech on hit lers latest blitzkrieg would be valuable ninety per cent of them were reported by secretary early to approve and the other 10 per cent to be from I 1 pea peace cea ce a at t any an analysis would be valuable because I 1 cant see how you can approve a speech when you dont know what it means I 1 have discussed this speech with several informed people they dont know what it means and V I 1 dont from its condemnation of treacherous brutality of hitler the approval I 1 I 1 should have been per cen cent t and also for its plea tor for pan amerl can unity in defense this unity the president called our solution but 0 u t then he said Is this solution 0 our u r solution permanent or sate safe if it Is solved for us alone I 1 think botill what does that mean it may seem a slight phrase to be quibbling about but no utterance by a president of the united states on our future course in a world at ayar war is a slight phrase this one intended to be slight it was coupled with an assertion that too many of us have been deceived by the false teaching leaching of geography into feeling sale safe physically economically no and socially from the impacts of attacks on civilization elsewhere then followed statements that from the point of view of conquest santiago chile is cleser to europe than alexander found macedonia to be from persia or than the distance caesar traveled from rome to spain that is four or five hours from africa to south america as compared with tour four or five weeks leeks it took the armies of napoleon to go from paris to rome or poland I 1 dont know what that means but it sounds like our frontier is in france the statement identifying airplane timetables with the pace of conquering armies or from the point of view of conquest Is utterly misleading almost as misleading as it would be to say that the speed of a race horse compares with that of a telegram an airplane can go from africa to south america in a few hours but an army cani it cant go at all if our navy and air force are efficient and afloat and not chasing boagey men in the east pacific this aspect of the speech was cryptic obscuration coupled with kith sensational and mIsI misleading dading terrorism it creates an occasion to repeat the quotation from lloyd georges speech that upset chamberlain the nation is ready as long asit as its S leadership is right as long as you say clearly what you are aiming at as long as you give confidence to them that their leaders are doing their best for them the president does the deliberate reverse of saying clearly what he Is aiming at his carefully guarded exterior seems to be full to the bursting point with some kind of interior content he often reveal but every time a new pressure com comes es a little of it squirts out like frontiers in france and quarantine the aggressors the ne whole country is behind him at any cost or effort to prepare this country tor for defense of this continent itis 90 per cent against any attempt at defending america by attacking in europe or asia with either men money or materials it would be a political icalas as well as naval and military cata catastrophe strophe for even tor for the relative ease of continental defense mr roosevelt has not prepared the military and naval weapons to make good his position and th the whole of recent history proves that bluffing on a bobtail is suicide PATS FATS IN THE FIRE the fats fati in the fire and our navy is in hawaii our miniature army Is relatively equipped with bows and arrows it is a pitiful Falstaf flan insufficiency we are quibbling about the design of a rifle a already a adopted and in production after years of experiment it appears now that the navy has known the facts of its weakness against bombs from above mines from below and secret foreign building programs tor for some time without admission before the crisis surely there was no ignorance in this government about the absolutely inefficient lent equipment of our army in almost everything needful tor for modern war and its own grotesque gp tesque inadequacy everybody Is now squawking about our lack of tin and rubber and our failure of action in motorizing and mechanizing our army this column has been squawking about it for five years severi seven years ago this writer had written into the recovery covely act ample authority and al appropriations 10 lo do all these things as a combination measure of re employment recover yand defense that was the year jear hitler started it was the year that the adminis I 1 ration gave most of that to arkins Br kins for or raking leaves |