It would be useful to point out that this generation of American youth is alive and enjoying the privileges of this country because other young men years ago and centuries ago fought and defeated the enemies of America. It would clear up many a young soldier’s difficulties if he were given an explanation in the simplest language of the origins and issues of the war. Many of them hardly know the bare facts of who is fighting whom. The American soldier has a right to be given the overwhelming evidence that Germany intends to destroy the American form of life, and subjugate us if she can; and that just now while Britain and Russia are absorbing so much German energy is the best time for us to defend ourselves by the only method of defense that has ever succeeded, by attack; by striking with all the power we possess at the enemy while he is still far from our shores. The American soldier should understand that much as we may wish for it, there is little hope that Britain and Russia alone could defeat the mighty German war machine, built as it was during the nine years while we slept. He should understand that this means we must fight in Europe, help destroy the German Air Force, invade the continent, and finally occupy Germany; that this will require every available resource of muscle and money and brain and blood and several more years of war, but that the reward for this immense payment is the immense reward of freedom. The American soldier has a right to have outlined to him the kind of world Hitler would make if he won; and the kind of world we hope to make if we win. This is the ABC of war, and it is what our soldiers desperately need, but it is unlikely that they will get it until we go to war. It takes a great deal of re-education to counter the last two decades of intellectual rule by our “Irresponsibles,”--professors, writers, artists, and scholars who debunked our past history and every ideal, taught that man’s economic life is all that matters, that soldiers are suckers, that we fought the last war for J. P. Morgan, and so on until bewildered American boys exclaimed: “My country owes me a living; I owe it nothing.” Yet that is not youth’s natural way. Hitler won the German youth not by offering them fun or comfort or material reward; he appealed to them to sacrifice themselves for their Fatherland, and they responded joyously, “like demons,” as Colonel Schieffer said. Nobody can persuade me that our American youth would not respond even more joyously to an honest appeal, but the appeal has to be clear, simple, ringing as the notes of a bugle in the morning. Let the cynics and the selfish jibe, but American youth will eventually respond to the call of President Roosevelt for the Four Freedoms, not just for themselves, but for all the world. Q. _But weren’t we suckers in the last war?_