Date of Issue: July 6, 1942

KEY DATES 1939 Germany invades Poland, sparking war in Europe. 1940 Selective Service Act adopted. All American males aged 21-36 are required to register for the draft. 1941 U.S. declares war on Japan, Italy and Germany. 1944 Allied Forces descend on Normandy in Operation Overlord. 1945 World War II ends. The allied forces (the U.S. Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union) defeat the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, Japan).

With the nation at war, citizens faced hard choices
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said last week that war production for the month of May was 4,000 planes, 1,500 tanks, 2,000 artillery pieces, and more than 100,000 machine and sub-machine guns. All of this equipment will be used in the effort to stop Germany, Italy and Japan from stamping out freedom and imposing totalitarianism.

	"The instincts of the nation are against sending 18- and 19-year-old boys to the battlefields of World War Two."

Yet here in the Land of the Free, people were not tough enough, frightened enough, or brave enough to make the vital decision to draft the best fighting men in the nation. The Land of the Free plainly did not yet understand the price of freedom today.

The instincts of the nation are against sending 18- and 19-year-old boys to the battlefields of World War Two. Yet the realistic but ugly fact faced by the War Department — but by few other people in the nation — is that the German army lead by Adolf Hitler has some 3000 divisions, plus innumerable other organizations. The simple fact is that the U.S. cannot raise an army of similar size or force without drafting boys of 18 and 19.

Further, boys of 18 and 19 make the best combat troops. They have the stamina to stand hardship. Drafting such boys produces the least possible disruption of war production, because few have acquired skills or jobs.

Still, it is repugnant to the U.S. to ask its children to fight. Neither the Administration nor Congress had the courage to ask the people — before the elections coming in November — to do anything so repugnant to peacetime thinking habits.

Realistic men in Washington believe that the boys of 18 and 19 will eventually be drafted to fight. A great many of today’s patriots who go to celebrate the Fourth of July in village greens and city parks know the same things in their hearts. Some are already willing to face the ugly necessities of war. But others cannot yet believe in anything so ugly.

It is true that Americans have already put forth a greater national effort in World War II than in any previous war. In a single bill last week, Congress authorized the spending of more money on the Army alone than the total U.S. cost of World War One -- $43 billion against $40 billion. All the same, a multitude of tough decisions must still be faced in the days ahead.