Worst Week

This was the worst week of the war. The nation took one great trip-hammer blow after another--vast, numbing shocks.

It was a worse week for the U.S. than the fall of France; it was the worst week of the Century. Such a week had not come to the U.S. since the blackest days of the Civil War.

Now, as in 1864, the fate of the nation was plainly in the balance. Now, as in 1864, only immediate and sustained miracles of effort and speed could tip the scales in the nation's favor.

As the week began, the Lafayette, as important to the war as any battleship, turned over at her pier. The story of the carelessness which lost her was even sadder (see p. 17).

At week's end, Singapore fell (see p. 18). The Axis had broken through. The nation now had only shreds of hope in the Far East.

Off the U.S.'s East Coast the sixteenth victim of Nazi submarines, Standard Oil tanker W. L. Steed, went down (see p. 26).

From Brest, the Nazi battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, with attendan' ships and planes, suddenly cut through the English Channel to home bases in the North Sea (see p. 27). Nightmarishly the U.S. looked at two new and fearful words: GERMAN FLEET.

Not All Bad. There was some good news. The U.S. hailed General MacArthur's great-hearted stand in Bataan, studied with savage satisfaction the Navy's detailed announcement of the raid on the Marshall and Gilbert Islands. And the great U.S. industrial machine hummed ever faster in its war of production. In Baltimore a test pilot took up the first bomber powered by a Ford-built motor. Americans, unbeatable at making things, were beginning to make the things they needed. The nation grimly heeded WPBoss Donald M. Nelson's statement that the "golden months" were gone, but that "ten silver months" were left (see p. 69).

And here & there, in back pages of the newspapers, little items said eloquently that the U.S. was still the U.S. In Colorado a 16-year-old lad braved frozen hands and feet to help haul a toboggan eight miles through snowdrifts on an 8,000-ft. mountain, rescue a pneumonia-stricken rancher. A lad crippled by two bone operations, tuberculosis of the hip, pneumonia, ptomaine poisoning, appendicitis, graduated at the head of his Manhattan high-school class.

The wheels of industry, the lad who nearly froze to death, the cripple who led his class, typified the real U.S. at War. The problem was how to use this U.S. strength.

At a press conference President Roosevelt outlined his strategy for applying this force. The United Nations would have to content themselves now with preventing any more Axis breakthroughs. Then they must wage a war of attrition and destruction and holding, until they could build up their superiority of arms and apply it to an offensive.

This war plan seemed now the only one possible. That meant that bad news would predominate for a long time, that good news would remain scarce.

Could the people take it? Washington did not seem to think the people could. Army and Navy communiques stressed good news, toned down bad. The President, in a testy mood, appeared to feel that the people did not yet understand the war. Congressmen, bogged in gloom and desperately trying to save face on their self-pension bill, potshot at each other (see p. 16).

But the nation seemed to think it could take it. Up & down the country editorial writers, living close to the people of their own communities, worried more about apathy than the collapse of morale. They wrote with bold strokes: AMERICA CAN LOSE; THE WAR CAN BE LOST; THIS SHOULD AWAKEN US.

The cry was for more bad news, for the truth. Washington had coddled the nation too long; had let them believe that the war could be fought to the finish in the antiseptic, sealed atmosphere of Lend-Lease.

The Only Way is Up. Signs of indifference were still plentiful: men recalled the acid remark of General Sherman, in the terrible weeks of 1864, when General Grant was losing 54,000 men, when civilians behind the Northern lines bickered about surrender: "I sometimes think our people do not deserve to succeed in war; they are so apathetic."

One of the nation's great spokesmen now spoke to the nation. On Lincoln's Birthday, Texas' stern, lemony, respected Congressman Hatton W. Sumners rose in the House to say:

"Great, stupendous, terrible times like this come rarely in the history of the ages, in the history of civilizations. . . . Such times come when nations and civilizations stand at the bar of judgment and must answer the philosophy of the parable of the talents. Only a great people can answer. Only a great people have. . . .

"I look day after day on the members of this House. I go about over the country. . . . I do not see yet that vital, stirring consciousness of responsibility, consciousness of danger . . . which we have got to have. . . .

"We have been losing this war from the time we began it, literally losing this war. We are being licked, and only the realization of that fact can arouse and solidify and vitalize the American people before it is too late. . . .

"The desire to please has so dominated the utterances of public officials that we have not told the people of America the God Almighty's truth about what we are up against. . . . We . . . have not measured up to our responsibility. We have been afraid to trust the people to hear the truth. In that we have misjudged the people. . . .

"The American people want to do this job. They have the stuff in them. . . ."

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