I was with the French at that time and can testify that Lindbergh’s words struck France like a blow between the eyes. The famous Lafayette Escadrille announced that it had deprived Lindbergh of his honorary membership. Lindbergh’s response to England was identical. He took his child to England after he had suffered his great family tragedy in America, and in England he received everything he desired: quiet hospitality and all the privacy he has said he wanted. But when England stood with her back to the wall, and once again the American attitude to the war became decisive; and once again the voice of a Lindbergh could have worked powerfully to shake our people into the tardy realization that this time would be the last time and that if we did not awaken now we might never be given the chance again; when our people needed to realize that the fate of America was inextricably bound up with the fate of Britain, and that if Britain fell our hopes would all become forlorn; then Lindbergh spoke. Now, he declared, we should cease to aid Britain in any manner, because Britain was beaten, Germany had won, and we had better make the best terms we could with the conqueror. With the total lack of shame which characterizes Hitler’s and Lindbergh’s political philosophy he declaimed in the same speech of June 16, 1940 that, “Fortunately, the wide wall of the Atlantic stands between us and the shooting that is going on.” It is, of course, the strong wall of the British Navy that stands between us and the shooting that is going on, but Lindbergh has never admitted that the British Navy plays any role in keeping the Germans from crossing the Atlantic; his implication is that the water of the Atlantic constitutes the sole hindrance to German passage. This incomprehension sometimes reaches a degree which is puzzling to an observer convinced that “at any rate Lindbergh is sincere.” Some obviously honest Americans argue that we can successfully hold aloof, but can any American really believe as Lindbergh said in his speech at the opening of the war, September 16, 1939: “These wars in Europe are not wars in which civilization is defending herself against some Asiatic intruder. There is no Genghis Khan or Xerxes marching against our Western nations. This is not a question of banding together to defend the white race against foreign invasion. This is simply one more of those age-old struggles within our family of nations.”