Early the following morning the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. America was at war.

The first casualties of war are often the spiritual values. Buchman believed these to be the basis of freedom, and he and his team had been able to carry them to people and situations seldom reached by the Churches. He therefore felt keenly the importance of keeping his trained, whole-time force intact.

Many American leaders supported this view. Thomas Edison's son, Charles, who was Secretary of the Navy, remarked that in national defence, 'Moral Re-Armament sharer equally in importance with material re-armament . . . Without character and a deep-seated moral re-armament bred in the fibre of our citizens .. . there will be little worth defending.'1

The two agencies mainly concerned to ensure the allocation of American manpower in war-time - the Department of Justice and the Selective Service - agreed that the Moral Re-Armament programme had a particular relevance to the war effort. In October 1940 the Justice Department approved the stay of 28 British MRA workers in the country as performing an essential service, and the Selective Service deferred the call-up of Americans, and later British, working with Moral Re-Armament as an essential element in the national defence programme. During 1941 a few of Buchman's American workers were classified as available for military service by local draft boards, but in each case the Presidential Appeals Board intervened and granted them deferment.

Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor the Chairman of the Presidential Appeals Board, Colonel John Langston, wrote to Buchman, 'I am firmly convinced that as our emergency grows more acute, the need for building the moral stamina of our people will correspondingly grow. The weaknesses of France did not show themselves as pronouncedly in the beginning. I get afraid of the smug complacence of many of our people who have softened to the point that they think they see straight when it is only a mirage. It will take all the morale-building that you and others who are giving their lives to this work can furnish to keep us on an even keel. Already I see efforts to unsettle and confuse Civilian Defence. It is hard to determine when such efforts are the natural, misguided efforts and confused thinking of patriots, or inspired work of subversive groups.

298