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Just thought this offers some perspective. One can only imagine where the world would be today had the US stayed out of WWII. My guess is I would'nt be posting this on FreeRepublic!

It recommends the maintenance of armed forces sufficient to defend this hemisphere from attack by any combination of foreign powers.

Had the US not entered WWII, the Axis domination of all of the the Eastern Hemisphere would have allowed them to accumulate forces that could not have been successfully resisted by the US alone.

Unfortunately, many Latin Amerian regimes would have been only too glad to provide bases and assistance to Axis forces on this side of the oceans.

His remarks were not illogical at the time, but history showed them to be profoundly misguided.

and I offer this as the rebuttal, Gotta love Patton: General George S. Patton, Jr., in characteristic unexpurgated detail, gives his troops a final pep-talk prior to the invasion of Normandy, Enniskillen Manor Grounds, England, May 17, 1944.

Men, this stuff some sources sling around about America wanting to stay out of the war and not wanting to fight is a lot of baloney! Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. America loves a winner. America will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise a coward; Americans play to win. That's why America has never lost and never will lose a war.

You are not all going to die. Only two percent of you, right here today, would be killed in a major battle. Death must not be feared. Death, in time, comes to all of us. And every man is scared in his first action. If he says he's not, he's a goddamn liar. Some men are cowards, yes, but they fight just the same, or get the hell slammed out of them.

The real hero is the man who fights even though he's scared. Some get over their fright in a minute, under fire; others take an hour; for some it takes days; but a real man will never let the fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty, to his country and to his manhood.

All through your Army careers, you've been bitching about what you call "chicken-shit drills." That, like everything else in the Army, has a definite purpose. That purpose is instant obedience to orders and to create and maintain constant alertness! This must be bred into every soldier. A man must be alert all the time if he expects to stay alive. If not, some German son-of-a-bitch will sneak up behind him with a sock full of shit! There are four hundred neatly marked graves somewhere in Sicily, all because one man went to sleep on his job--but they are German graves, because we caught the bastards asleep!

An Army is a team, lives, sleeps, fights, and eats as a team. This individual hero stuff is a lot of horse shit! The bilious bastards who write that kind of stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don't know any more about real fighting under fire than they know about fucking! Every single man in the Army plays a vital role. Every man has his job to do and must do it. What if every truck driver decided that he didn't like the whine of a shell overhead, turned yellow and jumped headlong into a ditch? What if every man thought, "They won't miss me, just one in millions?" Where in Hell would we be now? Where would our country, our loved ones, our homes, even the world, be?

No, thank God, Americans don't think like that. Every man does his job, serves the whole. Ordnance men supply and maintain the guns and vast machinery of this war, to keep us rolling. Quartermasters bring up clothes and food, for where we're going, there isn't a hell of a lot to steal. Every last man on K.P. has a job to do, even the guy who boils the water to keep us from getting the G.I. shits!

Remember, men, you don't know I'm here. No mention of that is to be made in any letters. The USA is supposed to be wondering what the hell has happened to me. I'm not supposed to be commanding this Army, I'm not supposed even to be in England. Let the first bastards to find out be the goddamn Germans. I want them to look up and howl, "Ach, it's the goddamn Third Army and that son-of-a-bitch Patton again!"

We want to get this thing over and get the hell out of here, and get at those purple-pissin' Japs!!! The shortest road home is through Berlin and Tokyo! We'll win this war, but we'll win it only by showing the enemy we have more guts than they have or ever will have!

There's one great thing you men can say when it's all over and you're home once more. You can thank God that twenty years from now, when you're sitting around the fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the war, you won't have to shift him to the other knee, cough, and say, "I shoveled shit in Louisiana."

I have talked to many hundreds of men and women, and I have letters from tens of thousands more, who feel the same way as you and I.

The old pacifists' trick! Claim you're in the majority despite the mountain of evidence showing otherwise.

I say it is the PACIFIST in America, as it was in England, and in France, who gives comfort to the enemy. I say it is they who are undermining the principles of democracy when they demand that we take a course to which more than 80 percent of our citizens are opposed. I charge them with being the real defeatists, for their policy has led to the defeat of every country that followed their advice since this war began. There is no better way to give comfort to an enemy than to divide the people of a nation over the issue of foreign war. There is no shorter road to defeat than by entering a war with inadequate preparation. Every nation that has adopted the PACIFIST policy of depending on some one else for its own defense has met with nothing but defeat and failure.

When history is written, the responsibility for the downfall of the democracies of Europe will rest squarely upon the shoulders of the PACIFISTS who led their nations into war uninformed and unprepared. With their shouts of defeatism, and their disdain of reality, they have already sent countless thousands of young men to death in Europe. From the campaign of Poland to that of Greece, their prophesies have been false and their policies have failed. Yet these are the people who are calling us defeatists in America today. And they have led this country, too, to the verge of war.

As noted in Patton's statement, I wish to make it clear.

America will never lose. America doesn't tolerate losers nor will we ever.

-Mal

A view of the latest Anti-War Protest

In time of war, truth is always replaced by propaganda.

PROPAGANDA ALERT: This is a lie. Some of us can figure out the difference.

I ask you to look at the map of Europe today and see if you can suggest any way in which we could win this war if we entered it. Suppose we had a large Army in America, trained and equipped. Where would we send it to fight? The campaigns of the war show only too clearly how difficult it is to force a landing, or to maintain an Army, on a hostile coast. Suppose we took our Navy from the Pacific, and used it to convoy British shipping. That would not win the war for England....

MILITARILY-IMPAIRED ALERT: Another talking head stating things he knows nothing about as though they were facts. My guess is that he didn't see the plans, either.

When history is written, the responsibility for the downfall of the democracies of Europe will rest squarely upon the shoulders of the interventionists who led their nations into war uninformed and unprepared.... If we concentrate on our own defenses and build the strength that this nation should maintain, no foreign army will ever attempt to land on American shores.

PSYCHIC SCAM ALERT: Guess his crystal ball was cracked.

At least the anti-war protesters back then weren't also anti-America. And, yes, I can say that, because the same blood that secured their freedom of speech also secured mine.