Why any body should ask me my reasons for not wanting to get into war is beyond me. Why do I want to avoid pestilence, poverty, starvation and the most heinous forms of human suffering? why do I not seek the reduction of homes to blackened rafters, the ends of glistening white human bones sticking through the quivering shreds of bloody flesh, the destitution and languishing of children, the shattering and dissolution of loving families, the abuse of the aged, the blasting of whole landscapes, the ruin of farms and cities, the bankruptcy of nations, the destruction of democracy, the overturning of altars and the coming of anti-Christ? Why do I shrink from a new crop of faceless, armless, legless men - dragging out blasted lives with no more pride in their own strength, manhood, beauty and virility that a toad in a cesspool.
If war is necessary to preserve more of our own people against these things that the number of soldiers who will suffer them, then, as a soldier, I am willing and eager. But to walk into war for the stubbornness, pride or ambition of any man of group of men when it is wholly unnecessary - no. And if I were on e of those men I would seek to curb my enthusiasm at least long enough tot consider my eventual dreadful responsibility at the bar of my country's opinion if she and I lived, and the more awful judgment who loves his human children if I died - which I and they most surely shall.
- Hugh Johnson to R. Douglas Stuart, Jr., January 8,1941