Germany's terrific confidence in its air force appears to me to be hardly justified. There is a little word called Ersatz which is going to loom very big in any war. Ersatz is the process of substituting artificial for basic materials, The Germans have been clever at it, but it is known that the German tractors and tanks which lumbered into Vienna when Germany occupied it broke down in a most disheartening way. The Ersatz materials used in the motors, the wheels and the treads failed to live up to advance expectations.
Today, Germany would probably win the first two months of any war, and then need would come for mech-animal replacements. This will entail Ersatz, and to date Germany has not shown' that it can make rubber out of best leaves or aeroplane propellers out of radish tops. Germany has great confidence in its war machine and is confident that it could beat the world. Germany is ignoring one factor which may be a fatal weakness—the human factor.
Germany has completely forgotten two things. It has forgotten the fact that England never loses that last battle, and it has forgotten Jim Hear-sum and several millions like him. Jim climbed down out of his cab back in 1914, took up a gun and won a war. And today Jim is ready to, do it all over again any time Neville Chamberlain beckons.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.