Guest commentary: Thoughts on Armistice Day reverberate 61 years later

During the years of the last world war, the people of this nation and all other nations were told, "This is a war to end wars."

Every ounce of our energy and strength was thrown into the blaze of patriotism that swept the country from shore to shore. Nothing was held back if the world could get free from future wars.

However, something went sour at the signing of the Armistice. The diplomats and statesmen of 1918 evidently stumbled badly, with the result our sons are once more over there to rid the world of more wars. In the years that followed the signing of the Armistice, we have learned that mankind was unchanged by its baptism of blood.

The same rivalries persist.

America has always hated war. And among its millions none loathed that suggestion more than the veterans of the previous conflicts. That is why the veterans of this nation were preaching preparedness against war. They were determined that prosperity must be spared similar calamities in the future.

Now, after 24 years from the signing of the Armistice, we are engaged in another war, a war that is testing our energy and patriotism. A war that is challenging our democratic form of government, our American way of living, those priceless ideals for which our defenders of the past and present are giving their lives so that posterity may continue to live as free men and women.

Armistice Day of 1942 finds the veteran and the American people firmly united to preserve with all our might, and even our very lives, all that America stands for. We must not have internal dissension. Our patriotism must flame like a furnace through which no invader, however strong, can break.

This government, the offspring of our own choice, uninfluenced, adopted upon full investigation and mature deliberation, completely free in its principles, in the distribution of its powers uniting security with energy, must not perish.

In order that our liberty may be preserved, thousands and thousands of our youths are leaving their home fires, their parents, their relations, their friends, their places of study and work, increasing our far-flung armed forces, where they are fighting for you and me.

So that we may honor and continue to love them, let us on this Armistice Day rededicate ourselves never to let them down.

As we stand beneath our national flag, our symbol that speaks a language close to our hearts, of the glory that is ours, of our passionate desire to make any sacrifice so that liberty and justice may always flutter deep in our hearts and in the hearts of all liberty-loving people. Before this flag of the United States of America, let our soul be joyful in the knowledge that our nation may continue to be a spring of liberty, of love and reunion before the eyes of God, the same beautiful, loving, helping, guiding light of American liberty.