U.S. losing ability to intimidate

Letter to the Editor:

Saturday, Sept. 19, I was invited as a special guest of a combined meeting of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. I am a life member of this organization but rarely attend meetings because my hearing is so bad I don’t know what is going on half the time. 

At this meeting I dearly wanted to tell those people some of the history I had lived through, but being a very poor public speaker I was afraid I would mess it up. So I resorted to this method to express my thoughts.

I wanted to tell them that history might well be repeating itself in our time. Before the beginning of World War II our country had let our military forces go down while Germany, Japan and Italy were building theirs up. Thus, as World War II began we were faced with a two-war fight. Our country had made protection treaties with the Philippine Islands, so as Japan began its southward invasion our country sent about all we had to help them. This consisted mostly of boat loads of young American men.

As the big three, as they were called at that time, met, Churchill persuaded President Roosevelt to make the European theater conflict a priority over the Pacific theater, so most of our war production went there. When I think of the two times they tried to take our freedom away, it is disturbing.

This is a guess on my part, but I believe that something like 30,000 young men and maybe more died as a result of our country not being prepared. There would have been no Bataan Death March. As history shows, when our country began to give its fighting men the machines of war, we dug them out from their caves, we sank them in the water and shot them out of the sky.

Now our present leader has dismantled our military forces below our pre-World War II level so that other countries would not feel intimidated. May God have mercy on our country.

– L.A. Trotter,

Libby