On the Offensive

We are losing this war by default. We spent two years backing out of Europe, and it will take us less time, apparently, to back out of the Orient. The Russians alone are advancing, and they can hardly be expected to continue without support. Unless we have the courage and the initiative to give up passive defense for active offense we shall very shortly find ourselves executing a strategic retreat from Cambridge, and retiring to defend Belmont Hill.

The failure of our strategy can hardly be attributed to our military master-minds. Its counterparts are too much in evidence throughout our society for the cause to lie so near the surface. We are on the defensive militarily, just as we are on the defensive politically, economically, and psychologically, because basically we think of ourselves as representatives of the status quo, attempting to preserve it against a powerful new order. We are attempting to resist the principle of change, and we are beginning to see the hopelessness of that task. Upon our ability to develop plans for our own new order, and to fight the war with these plans in view, depends victory or defeat.

The Nazis know what they want, and they are willing to do anything and everything to get it. We cannot, in the nature of things, set up definite and monolithic objectives. The democratic process is not instantaneous nor apt to produce rigid doctrines. But once we admit that the war must produce a new society, and that the conduct of the war must determine the nature of the peace, we shall be on the way to a gradual working out of the problems that brought about the war and created the enemies we face.

Jesse Jones preaching business as usual and letting us in for a serious rubber shortage; Senator Walsh asking that our navy be called back to defend continental America; Churchill withholding Indian independence in the face of a desperate threat to Britain's eastern empire: these are only symptoms of an attitude that is costing us lives now, and may cost us victory later. It is an attitude that contrasts strangely with the willingness of the Russians to destroy the Dniepropetrousk Dam, the greatest achievement of their nation, because they could look forward to building a better dam when the war was over. With this courage and this vision we must take the offensive now.