War Means War: Republicans and Conservatives Had Better Face Reality

A lot of people are history aficionados when it comes to World War II. It’s an amazing, and of course, awful story. Fifty million dead. The mass killing of Jews, Poles, and the unbelievable slaughter on the Eastern Front. Cities were carpet bombed, populations displaced.

In the summer of 1941 the Nazis held most of Europe. The first part of the war was over and Adolf Hitler had won it. Germany and its allies controlled territory stretching from the Atlantic to the North Sea, around the Mediterranean Sea and down into North Africa.

Hitler and his generals began the work of entrenching, including the building of the Atlantic Wall to stop any allied invasion. Here are a few facts from the opening of one documentary about it: Forty million tons of concrete were poured. Fifteen thousand bunkers were built stretching 3,000 miles. Mine fields were laid, and artillery positions were constructed. According to one scholar, it was the most gigantic fortification built in world history.

For Americans who agree with the vision of the Founding Fathers as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, there’s a sense that we’re up against a similar wall. That wall is the liberal domination of the schools, pop culture, and the media. It’s going to require an enormous amount of work to break through the strongholds and free the country from the grip of cultural and economic Marxists.

Let’s look back again to WWII – here’s Townhall.com’s Rich Galen:

In the case of D-Day, there were years of planning, not just the military actions in North Africa, Italy, then France, but there were years of planning to mine the coal to smelt the iron ore to create the steel to build the planes, vehicles, and ships that would be needed to move the guns, food, fuel, clothing and all the other items that an army needs to function.

Back at home, just about just about every American in every every village and town was in the war. Whether participating in a scrap iron drive, or suffering (with varying degrees of equanimity) with ration coupons for everything from gasoline to condensed milk, American civilians were called upon to help the war effort.

After enough bodies were thrown against the German defenders the attackers got beyond the Nazi Atlantic Wall and went on to fight through the Norman hedgerow country. Depending upon who is counting, there were some 9,000 casualties among the Allies and, according to Canadian historian Col. C.P. Stacey, that number included about 3,000 deaths.

For those who think that June 6, 1944 to V-E Day was about 10 minutes, consider this: The breakout at St. L – that opened the vast French plain to Allied forces – wasn’t accomplished until late July. It took almost six weeks to slug the 21 miles from Omaha Beach.

Rich Galen then quotes from the book, “Normandy, Battles that Changed the World”:

Despite having landed about a million men and 177,000 vehicles in Normandy by July, their lodgment remained modest, extending inland for 25 miles at best but for little more than five miles in most places.

Here’s Victor Davis Hanson (emphasis added is mine):

How did the Allies get from the beaches of Normandy to Germany in less than a year? Largely by overwhelming the Wehrmacht with lots of good soldiers and practical war materiel. If German tanks, mines, machine guns and artillery were superbly crafted, more utilitarian American counterparts were good enough — and about 10 times as numerous. Mechanically intricate German Tiger and Panther tanks could usually knock out durable American Sherman tanks, but the Americans produced almost 50,000 of the latter, and the Germans fewer than 8,000 of the former.

I have some bad news for Republicans and conservatives who sit around watching their favorite cable news network, visit their favorite political websites, send emails to fellow tea partiers, or attend events that have nothing to do with outreach: we’re at war. It’s an information war and the vast majority of our efforts need to be aimed at reaching the uninformed and misinformed, not becoming ever more informed about things we already know.

In these past few articles I’ve been referring to the people with big wallets. The work ahead is going to cost a lot of money. That’s why we need more big donors to stop funding organizations that suck at outreach. Those dollars are needed by those who understand how to fight the information war.

To those with big microphones, your leadership is not optional. We need you to inspire people to participate in much greater numbers than ever before. We’ve all heard the stories about how men willingly enlisted to fight in World War II. Today, recruiting people into politics isn’t easy because so many creeps dominate GOP politics. (See a series of articles on that topic starting here.)

I’ve said this before: When World War II began in Europe in September 1939 the Unites States was woefully unprepared for a fight. Even after we finally entered the war in December 1941 the country was a long way from being fully mobilized. By May of 1943, however, President Franklin Roosevelt said that “the American people have accomplished a miracle.” By the fall of 1943 the American war machine was operating at maximum capacity. By then the factories and shipyards ran twenty-four hours a day.

Republicans and conservatives need to wake up to reality. Winning the war to save the country won’t be won unless we treat it like a war. Remember the military recruitment poster? Uncle Sam is pointing at you.

First posted in July 2014.

Image credit: American supplies unloaded in Normandy, France, in 1944.