A. No, because the Germans have expressed indifference to whether we enter the war only because they were absolutely convinced that we would not do so; when we do enter the war it will be an even greater shock than if they had anticipated it all the time. Our official behavior for a long time, and the utterances of our isolationists all the time, led the Nazis to believe we were really for peace at any price; that nothing, neither injury nor insult, could move us to war. When the first Neutrality Act was passed in August, 1935, the Germans, as I have recently been reminded by a friend who was in Berlin at the moment, chortled with glee, and editorials boasted that now Europe could settle its troubles secure from the meddlesome Yankee. No one can estimate how much influence this surrender of American rights had upon Hitler during that critical time when he was weighing his strength against all his possible enemies. The Germans are convinced we are a money-loving people and when the Johnson Act was passed, forbidding credit to any nation in default on payment of its debt to us, they exclaimed: “Now the Americans will never go to war again because they can’t make money out of it.” The Johnson Act almost persuaded some Germans that we had changed sides, and Nazis revived their chatter about the essentially Germanic character of America. We Americans may be wishful thinkers, but the Germans, fortunately, are even more addicted to the vice than we. Goebbels’ control of the press promotes it. Every isolationist speech made is printed at length in the German newspapers and the voice of Lindbergh is taken as the voice of America. The re-election of Roosevelt was the first warning the German people had that America might act to defend herself. Now sensible Germans are beginning to be frightened. I know how the German people regard America. They call it the “land of unlimited possibilities.” It has always been the dreamland of the Germans, and if our immigration laws had permitted it, we should have had tens of millions of Germans coming to this country after the war. The tremendous size and economic power of America fascinate all classes of Germans; they have never forgotten the shock they received when, after the armistice in 1918, they learned for the first time what their government had concealed from them, that there were over two million American soldiers in France. Hitler tried to stamp out German admiration or regard for any foreign country, and doubtless German successes in this war have influenced the German attitude to a degree, but the fundamental element in German thought about America is their ineffaceable memory of the last war: “America joined our enemies; we lost. If America goes to war against us again, we cannot win.” It would be decisive. Q. _But where would we fight Germany? What is the good of America’s entering the war if there is no battleground?_