On the big screen, Spy Smasher was out front in the fight for Freedom.  On radio, it was The Green Hornet.

"No more quibbling over petty party affiliation!" the Hornet demanded.  "No more daydreaming or wishful thinking!  It's time for doing!  It's time to make our individual contribution to the building of the best defense any nation ever had!"

Kids wanted radio's Superman in on the action and faster than a speeding bullet he was in a battle to the death with a Nazi super-soldier.  

"Hurtling downwards once more, the Man of Steel draws Atom Man's fire, swooping and darting like a red and blue meteor as fierce green lightning stabs at him and stabs again and again, crackling and hissing like a thousand giant snakes. Savagely, Atom Man hurls his deadly power at his swirling, darting foe.

"Is this the end? Has the one and only survivor of the amazing civilization that once flourished on the planet Krypton finally met his match?

"Fellows and girls, don't miss tomorrow's amazing adventure!"

But nothing stirred our imagination like news of General Patton.

His Third Army seemed to be everywhere, outrunning its maps, straining its supply lines, doing the impossible.

Could he get his men and tanks to Bastogne in three days?  General Eisenhower asked.

Racing north 100 miles over icy roads, they were there in two days.

Could he get those 250,000 men and 40,000 tanks across the Rhine?

They rolled across the river.

"Stay clear of the city of Trier," Eisenhower ordered.  "It's too well fortified to enter with less than four divisions."

"Have taken Trier with two divisions," Patton replied. "You want me to give it back?"

Lest we forget: Hitler's attack on Czechoslovakia began with the conquest of Austria.

His attack on Norway began with the occupation of Denmark.

His attack on Greece began with the attack on Albania and Bulgaria.

His attack on the Suez Canal began with the invasion of the Balkans and North Africa.

Nobody could foretell exactly where or when an attack would come, but we knew enough not to wait until Hitler was in our front yard.

But in Holland:

"Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves. The Gestapo is treating them very roughly and transporting them in cattle cars to Westerbork, the big camp in Drenthe to which they're sending all the Jews.

"If it's that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those far away and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them?

"We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they're being gassed."

                                    - - - Anne Frank, October 9, 1942

"The rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which seemed to the founders of our Republic, and to us, inalienable, were to Hitler and his fellows empty words which they proposed to cancel forever.

"The propositions they advanced to take the place of Thomas Jefferson's inalienable rights were these:

"That the individual human being has no rights, whatever.

"That his only duty is the duty of obedience, not to his God, not to his conscience, but to Adolph Hitler. And that his only value is his value not as a man but as a unit of the Nazi State.

"To Hitler, government, as we conceive it, is an impossible conception; the government to him is not the servant and the instrument of the people, but their absolute master and the dictator of their very act.

"To Hitler, the church, as we conceive it, is a monstrosity to be destroyed by every means at his command. The Nazi church is to be the national church, a pagan church, absolutely and exclusively in the service of but one doctrine, one race, one nation.

"To Hitler, the freedom of men to think as they please and speak as they please, and worship as they please, is of all things imaginable most hateful and most desperately to be feared.

"The issue of our time, the issue of the war in which we are engaged, is the issue forced upon the decent self-respecting peoples of the earth by aggressive dogmas of this attempted revival of barbarism.

"This proposed return to tyranny, this effort to impose again Doctrines of absolute obedience, of dictatorial rule, of suppression of truth, of oppression of conscience, is what free nations of the Earth long ago rejected."

---President Franklin Roosevelt


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