Viewing page 204 of 547

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

3:15 plane for Boston to participate in the conference this evening with Roy and Blanchard.  Whitey set a price on the guns that I felt was too high to land the job but St. L. was ^[[not]]itching so hard for this one which was the reason.  Personally I would have bid lower.

The trend of the "Total War" in Europe now is extremely grave.  The Nazis are smashing through everything - have already overrun Holland and have it completely in their possession.  In Belgium and France it has been slower going but compared to 1914 has even then been a veritable sprint and they are still advancing with their objectives apparently Paris and the channel ports. The latter for the final devastating knockout on England herself - "capitulate or be utterly destroyed from the air".  One hears nothing but "war, war, war" everywhere now.  The inevitable appears near - a victorious Hitler over France and England.  The issue isn't settled yet but even the British and French are admitting to their people the extreme seriousness of the situation - preparing them for the worst.  And we in America can see the imminent possibility - almost probability - of the vanishing of a secure way of life, the [[?oncome]] of a new and ominous change to our whole thought and living.  Already Congress and the President are setting in motion an arms expansion program surpassing anything before dreamed of.  And tonight as Willie Rog and I took a walk down to the bay, under the fresh new leaves and the warm evening sky, the birds singing, the clean, sweet air of May, I wondered what lay ahead - what all this will mean to us all, to our future, our happiness - most of all perhaps, to Bab and Rog.