The command is forward : selections from addresses on the motion picture industry in war and peace (1944)

No Blitz Required {From an address at a War Activities Committee Rally, Willard Hotel, Washington, D. C, January II, 1943.) No bombs on Pearl Harbor were needed to galvanize the American motion picture industry into action in the struggle between freedom and oppression. Eighteen months before the sneak attack of the Japanese we were enlisted in the fight for adequate national defense. The very month that France fell — the very week when the true spirit of the democracies, defeated but unconquered, stood forth in shining splendor on the bloody beaches at Dunkerque, leaders of our industry organized the Motion Picture Committee Cooperating for National Defense and pledged full support to our Commander-in-Chief. All branches of the industry joined in this service. National defense films, produced by or for important federal agencies, were shown in thousands of theatres throughout 1941, and on that fateful December 7th, at the very moment when Pearl Harbor was bombed, a tenminute short subject titled Bomber was being shown in theatres throughout the country — and in Honolulu — to dramatize and emphasize our need to speed up the production of a mighty armada of the skies. And yet the record of this period would not be complete without reference to the sorry spectacle of a few isolation 6