Again, the Pope clearly describes war crimes being committed, but without specifically naming either the criminal Nazis and Soviets, or their chief victims, Poles and Finns.
One is left to wonder why.
Still and all, charges that the Pope was somehow "silent" in the face of evil are obviously not the case, at least not so far...
Indeed Americans, then as now, would not be dragged into war in some morally ambiguous situation, where right and wrong were not clearly spelled out.
So the Pope's words, even if not as pointed as some historians might wish, still helped many Americans begin to understand that the war was NOT morally ambiguous, and that such serious wrongs could not be set right by mere half measures.
Notice also the Pope holds out no false hopes or rosy scenarios. He clearly says the worst is yet to come.
One wonders if even he could then imagine how much horribly worse it would eventually get...
http://www.onwar.com/chrono/1940/mar40/f25mar40.htm
New rule for British POWs
Monday, March 25, 1940 www.onwar.com
From London... The government forbids British prisoners of war from making radio broadcasts for the enemy.
Some comments on whether the Pope knew how bad it was going to be:
Other than a few “forward thinkers” who can grasp the significance of changes in technology, most people look at the current war in terms of how the last one was fought. For example, we just had an article yesterday or two days ago analyzing the effect of air power on naval warfare. The article stated that it was yet to be determined whether air power was going to be dominant over traditional surface sea power. Well, we all know how that got resolved. First there was the British raid on Taranto, which showed that ships at anchor in harbor were vulnerable to air attack. Then came the hunt for the Bismarck, where she was crippled by a torpedo, but not sunk by air power. The “lesson” was that a ship under way could defend itself against air attack. Pearl Harbor was just another Taranto. It was the sinking of HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse that caused people to sit up and take notice. The debate was finally closed in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea in early 1943. From that time on, the Japanese never again sailed into waters within range of American land-based aircraft. It was a confession that they had lost the war, although it was not then generally realized.
But I digress. Significantly. I would imagine the Pope was thinking in terms of 1914-1918 when he thought things would get worse. In some aspects, that WW2 would be much worse than WW1 was widely known. It was known that bomber fleets could (and would) lay waste to entire cities far behind the battle lines. Some things would still be the same as WW1. Verdun in 1916 was duplicated at Stalingrad in 1942. Some things could only been seen darkly, where the Turkish genocide of Armenians would be reproduced with the German genocide of the Jews.
In some aspects, things would actually be better than feared. The WW1 weapon of mass destruction, poison gas, so recently used by the Italians in Ethiopia, would not be used. But I cannot imagine that His Excellency would ever dream that the small amount of energy released by splitting a uranium atom could be multiplied trillions or quadrillions of times in a chain reaction.