Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society
History Quarterly Digital Archives

Source: 1942 Volume 5 Number 1, Page 3

Total war in defense of life, liberty, and religious freedom from our local point of view

Page 3

Some years ago, a member of the Friends' Peace Society, who had traveled extensively in Europe, addressed a full house at the Valley Friends' Meeting, Tredyffrin. He said in substance that the German Republic had fallen because France and Great Britain had refused the return of the German colonies, also that any regime promising an outlet for the excess German population would control their government and that a war of conquest would follow in a few years.

In less than a year thereafter the Nazis struck. France, decadent, weary of war, and spotted with treason, became an easy victim; Great Britain, smug, unprepared, and bettered, is still on the defensive; while America, cast headlong into the greatest conflict of all time with the mightiest military combination on earth, is inevitably losing precious time in readjustment to total war. Boasting of what we propose to do, casting money about with reckless abandon, coupled with purely defensive measures, will not win this war. No nation has the exclusive patent of bravery.

We are now in the preliminary stage, the most difficult phase of a republican form of government, and so we record it as a part of our contemporaneous history. We, as a new and virile nation, have had altruistic wars before and take pride in the knowledge that we have always come out victorious, but this is a total war and maybe only the fittest nations shall survive it.

Individually it is possible that we cannot envision the terrible cost to ourselves in fighting the powers of darkness, the sorrow, the privation, and nerve racking price we all must pay before ultimate victory. Yet the price is not too high and our morale must be sustained to the end.

Doubtless, in the transition to total war, our more practical citizens will learn to engage in work most useful to that end and suitable to their individual capabilities, and by precept and example will influence our more excitable neighbors not to allow the circulation of rumors.

None can deny that there may be many dark days to come. Victory may be costly indeed, so very costly that it may bring, temporarily at least, ruin to all nations engaged, but as sure as there is a God in heaven we shall rise again, purged of a festering sore.

It is our purpose to record here the local defense programme, the Tredyffrin- Easttown preparation and cooperation recording to the national plan, as a piece cut from the whole cloth in the gigantic struggle for the continued existence of the American nation.