My mother, Elinor Fairchild Stebbins, March 10, 2010, Washington, D.C., immediately after being awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for her service during WWII as one of 1,074 Women's Airforce Service Pilots.
Follows is a letter my mother wrote to the editor of the New York Herald Tribune, and was published on October 6, 1946. It is as relevant today as it was then.
To the New York Herald Tribune:
If you have read Mr. Wallace’s speech and his letter to President Truman carefully and yet feel that he advocates purely an ideological solution to the problems facing our country today, or that the principles which he sets forth are merely the product of wool-gathering without a solid foundation, then I am afraid you have already forgotten—as we were afraid you might—the great numbers of our American youth who paid with their lives and counted it fair so that we might live in peace.
How can we, by national inertia, cancel the gains won at such a price? How can we sit back and let political pedagogy flaunt the doctrine of might makes right without becoming angry? If our country takes these sacrifices with indifference, it will be the cruelest ingratitude the world has ever known.
I say these things not with any political authority. I say them simply as an American who has not forgotten and who echoes the determination of many of my friends now dead that “it must not happen again.”
My part in the war was not great, but it was twofold. I flew as a service pilot and in that capacity worked with men I’m sure have not forgotten—men of the 19th Bomb Group, which suffered such great losses in the Philippines and Java in 1941: men of the 8th Air Force, which had lost sixty ships on one mission over Germany, and men who were to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a pilot, I remember.
I also remember as a woman. We, the women of the United States, lost men in this war, and yet we too counted it fair. We were proud. Our men fought well. They believed in a cause which they were willing to die for—and, after all, it was a war to end all wars. They did not die in vain, or so we believed, and so must we continue to believe.
Haven’t we learned? Wasn’t it proved very bitterly to us that war is not a solution? You can’t hope to build a world on the democratic principles for which this country stands, by force. How can any of you who have suffered in the war just past allow yourselves to be deluded by alarmist propaganda clamoring, however diplomatically, for another?
Remember, we, the people in America, have just finished a pretty well fed fight. There was no physical suffering in our country. Our homes were not destroyed. Our families were not living in constant dread of annihilation by bombing, disease or starvation. We did not see our children dying in the streets or in their cradles because we did not have enough to feed them. No, America. We could sit in our comfortable homes and listen to our radios without fear. We have never known terror at the sound of airplanes overhead.
Think about it. Have you stopped to consider what another war would mean? You know the effect of the atomic bomb on civilization. Do you suppose for one minute that the poor remnants of civilization left after an atomic war would be in a position to build a solid democracy?
If we are so sure our way of life is right, why don’t we prove it? Not by talk, but by actually living the doctrines which we preach. Suppose we were able to look for a minute behind the Russian “iron curtain”? Suppose we did find intolerance and persecution? Do you think we, in this country today, are in a position to move into a brick house? Of course we’re not.
Before we can hope to lead any country to believe that democracy is a better form of living than collectivism, we must first pay our national debt to our youth who paid the price of war without question. We must build the peace right here at home on the foundation they laid with their lives.
If we can do that, then and only then will we be able to assume, in our own eyes and in the eyes of the world, a position of leadership—not in war, but in peace—a strong, living peace based on the ideals upon which the United States of America was founded.
Elinor Fairchild
Pelham Manor, NY
October 2, 1946
Note: Vice-President Wallace’s speech and his letter to President Truman (linked above) are instructive and perhaps more relevant today than ever.
For present-day context see this May 12, 2017, New York Times Op-Ed by Henry Scott Wallace, Vice-President Wallace’s grandson.
