National Unity

We hear so much about national unity these days and how it is so much worse than it was in WW2. It ain't necessarily so.

I'd like to quote from the introduction of a book published in 1943. "The Battle Is The Pay-Off" by Captain Ralph Ingersoll who was editor of the newspaper "PM" before he joined the Army.

Forget draft boards and legal or moral compulsions. Take the world as it is today. How would each one of us act if we were completely free agents? Would we still go to war or would we sit this one out?

We had been soldiers now for a month. That's long enough to know how tough it is for a soft civilian to march even five miles with nothing but a rifle on his shoulders and no pack, how uncomfortable it is to sleep on a hard narrow cot. It is long enough, too, to know that, man for man, in the field, soldiers who could walk not five miles but twenty miles and to whom a cot was not a hardship but a luxury, would have very little difficulty killing us.

The military phrase for a soldier's missioin is quite explicit. It is to impose one's will on the enemy. At the end of a month in the army we knew - and it was quite a startling bit of new knowledge - how weak we were, how easy it would be in a showdown for anyone to impose his will on us. If we were not yet disciplined, we already knew the value of discipline - for already we had been lost on marches, we had mock-fired in mock skirmishes on those who were supposed to be our friends. We knew, all the big talk aside, how we stank.

We also knew, fresh in the morning, marching in solid columns, swinging out from camp with our new M-1's on our shoulders, just how tough an army that was good could be. Well the German army was that good - as good as we felt in the early morning, as good as the best of our daydreams about ourselves.

All right, so that's the German army and the Japanese army too, and even the Italians must be better than we were. And there are all these armies in the world, our sworn enemies - whether we were Republicans or Democrats, bright or stupid, skilled or unskilled.

So now thinking it over, talking it over, what would we do - today - if there were no draft boards, no sudden impulses to enlist? Well this was the choice that we now understood: that either we accepted the will imposed by armies made up of stronger, tougher, better soldiers than we, or else we - first individually and then collectively - would have to create an army that was even tougher.

In the next few paragraphs Ralph goes into details about a soldiers life. Then he comes to the heart of the matter:

It was painfully obvious to the most casual observer in the summer of 1942 that Americans did not then understand. The pace of the army's training, the controversies in the papers, the crowds at the USO, the ceaseless murmuring tide of talk, talk, talk, from one continental coast to the other, the silly nonsense on the advertising billboards, the bad taste of speeches to raise money for war bonds - everywhere one turned there were symptoms. The whole American world seemed unconcious of what were the only realities to us in camp. The hardness of the ground when you threw yourself on it making mimic charges - that was real. The hard ground symbolized the truth that only hardness and discipline and self-consecration of millions could produce an army that could impose its will on the enemy who is attempting to impose his will on us.

Aching on the ground, I thought of the softness of a bed. Hungry on a cook's bad day, I thought of the dinner that I had the money to buy if I were somewhere else. And I understood the apeaser for the first time. The appeaser, I thought, was simply a more imaginitive man than I. He was simply a man who could look ahead and see the price he would have to pay for opposing the will of an armed enemy. Feeling the softness of his bed and the cool caress of the sheets and the peace that comes only with a full belly, he knew he would be content to submit to the conqueror just to be allowed to stay where he was. He understood the bargain he was making; he was prepared to rely on his wits to see that the enemy lived up to his end of it. I understood how he felt and I wished sometimes I felt the same way.

Here we are some 60 years on and not much has changed. The question is still the same. Whose will is going to prevail?

Update: 06:41z 04 August 2005

Some notes about PM magazine from Ketupa:

PM was defiantly to the Left in an otherwise largely conservative publishing milieu and, more remarkably, aimed to operate as a mass-circulation daily based on sales rather than advertising. That model seems to have been flawed and the paper expired in 1948 despite substantial support from retail heir Marshall Field III (1893-1956), who had launched the liberal daily Chicago Sun in 1941 and went on to found the Chicago Sun-Times in 1948.