(5 of 5)
Madness or Order? In the minds of many men by last week the sombre conviction had grown that their world was spinning into insanity. "A mad world, debt-burdened and bankrupt, with repudiation, disaster and chaos threatening," Publisher Roy Howard called it after a trip through the Far East. Everywhere there were symptoms of madness.
Saxons fought Anglo-Saxons and destroyed the monuments their cultures had built. Off the coast of Africa, Frenchmen fought Frenchmen and their former allies, the British. In Indo-China Frenchmen fought their conqueror's allies, the Japanese. In China, yellow men fought yellow men, even as white men fought white men in Europe and black men fought black men—on white men's orders —in Africa.
Nations allied themselves with nations to destroy other nations, knowing that once their task was completed they would turn on their allies, even as Britain and France had turned on each other.
But, mad or not, the world was taking sides in a mighty battle of continents. There was order in all the moves. The battle lines were now clearly drawn between free capitalism and autarchy, between the semi-democracies and the totalitarians, between what Publisher Howard called the Have Gots and the Have Nots. Against the 250,000,000 people Joachim von Ribbentrop boasted of, the British Empire and China had 959,000,000. The U. S. and South America had another 200,000,000. In resources the Have Nots were outmatched. In immediate war power they were far superior.
Battle of the Oceans. The great battle had already begun. Pundit Walter Lippmann called it the Battle of the Oceans. The day before the pact was signed he wrote: "The battles over England and northern Europe and in the English Channel, at Gibraltar, toward Egypt and Suez, at Dakar in Africa and in French Indo-China are the opening battles of a great campaign in which there is at stake . . . the mastery of the oceans of the world.
"These battles . . . are strategically one great battle. . . . For if [Germany, Italy and Japan] are to become the undisputed masters of Europe, Asia and Africa, they must be masters of the seas. . . . At the present time we control the Panama passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Britain controls the other passage. While this control remains, the German, Italian and Japanese Navies are divided: the passages through which they must pass in order to concentrate their forces for a decisive blow are plugged in the English Channel, at Gibraltar, Suez and Singapore. . . . The grand objective of the Axis is to crush sea power in its main base in the British Isles, and at the same time to clear a passageway from Europe to the Pacific. . . . If this objective is obtained, we shall stand on the defensive in the two oceans."