The German invasion of Scandinavia was immediately recognized in the United States as augurating a new stage in the war. Whatever the reason, military opinion in the United States felt, after the first surprise was over, that Germany had committed a strategic blunder. The invasion, as well as marking a new military stage in the war, also marked a new stage in thought about the war. It brought home a more thorough realization of what Naziism realy meant. The period of optimistic self-deception was at last over. It was no longer possible to retire from one comforting thought to another; opinion had its back to the wall of hard reality. At first Hitler was believed to be interested solely in rectifying the territorial losses of Versailles; then he was assumed to be striving to incorporate all peoples of the Germanic race into one fatherland. This might have had e moral justification, but further stages in the progress of Naziism showed that Hitler's horizon was still wider. The war showed his desire for domination of central and western Europe and led to the clear declaration of the Nazi belief in the Germans as a master race who had a right to be dominant over inferior peoples, such as Poles and Czechs. Such a conception did not greatly affect the United States. The invasion of Norway, however, showed that Naziism was like a cancer, the spread of which could not be confined to any area. The threat of world domination once again hung over mankind.
President Roosevelt himself put the matter with convincing clarity in an address made to the Board of the Pan American Union: "today we can have no illusions. Old dreams of universal empire are again rampant. We hear of races which claim the right of mastery. We learn of groups which insist that they have the right to impose their way of life on other nations. We encounter economic compulsions, shrewdly devised to force great areas into political spheres of influence. All this is not a mere academic interest."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.