Digital Extra: The Journal's 175th Anniversary

07.21.2004

1940. United States urged to help war effort in Britain

Hitler was crashing through Europe in 1940.

In August, President Roosevelt visited Newport to tour the Naval War College.

The Journal that month published a relentless series of editorials imploring the administration to ready the country to defend itself from the Nazis.

"He fails us as President," the paper wrote Aug. 8, "because, thinking of himself as candidate, he does not make the decisions that cannot wait to be made until the political air is clearer."

In another editorial that month, The Journal argued: "If Britain fails in these intensely critical days and hours of blitzkrieg, the last barrier between us and Germany disappears. Are we going to be dumb witnesses, standing idly by, if the British fail to hold? Is this last barrier between these free United States and Nazi Germany to disappear while we gaze in bewilderment at the present scene?"

In a third editorial, The Journal urged direct aid to Britain, and was blunt about the reasoning: "Our interest in a British victory is to save our own hides. It's as simple and selfish as that . . .

"If we don't save our own skins in this way, we will have to save them later in a much harder way. If ships and planes to Britain now will do the trick, who prefers to do it later with American lives?"