Why Europe Fights
By
$2.50
MORROW
Why Europe Fights appears at a time when the American people are beginning to feel themselves part of the new world struggle. Moreover, the name of the writer carries its own appeal to, particularly, young America. What Walter Millis had to say about the last war had enough influence to become an article of faith among the American youth. His Road to War showed the road that the United States might have avoided had it not been for Allied propaganda and big money, so ran the argument.
However, there is nothing in Why Europe Fights which would fortify the younger generation in refusing to be ‘had’ as their fathers allegedly were ‘had.’ Indeed, Mr. Millis today is a signatory of a manifesto calling upon the United States to take up arms by the Allied side. The fact is that this neo-revisionist of the last war is as orthodox about the origins of the present war as a newspaper headline. In his new book he contents himself with collating the history of what has turned out to be a 21-year-old truce. The war, he says, came ‘very largely because Adolf Hitler was the kind of man he was, and because he thought and acted as he did.’ As simple and straightforward as that! This may lose Mr. Millis some of his younger admirers; but it is a great gain for common sense.
For the minor share of the blame the author criticizes democratic statesmanship. ‘ Democratic statesmen,’ he says, ‘surrendered when they might have been firm and . . . did not dare surrender when firmness could no longer prevent a war.’ That, too, is an orthodox judgment. To what extent firmness where there was surrender would have promoted peace is another question. Mr. Millis’s chronicle — the record of an inexorable march of events to Nemesis — and his pillorying of Hitler rather make the aspersion a terminological exercise. War is the result of an intolerable situation, and the relation between Hitler and the Allies had been growing more and more intolerable since the Nazi occupation of the Rhineland. Poland happened to be the agent of explosion.
It would be superficial so to assign and so to personalize all responsibility for the conflict. (And Mr. Millis isn’t superficial. He is one of the most brilliant journalists in America today.) The personalities are imbedded in a complex of 21 years of economic dislocation and of bitterness and defeat. In this broader assignability, failure to join the League of Nations is the black mark against America. American coöperation might have made possible the building of a real world order based upon the necessities of a common existence. Perhaps, however, Mr. Millis might have given credit to the backdoor efforts of Messrs. Stimson and Hull to make world organization count. There are other notable omissions. Surely there should be some mention of the HawleySmoot tariff in a book which attaches so much responsibility for the war to economic dislocation. Nor is the iron in North Spain mentioned as a magnet of Nazi intervention in Spain. One could mention more, but the surprising thing is that in this short volume Mr. Millis has covered so many details of the crowded era between wars.