Current press articles and periodical literature, both in the United States and abroad, are manifesting a developing interest in trans-polar aviation and Arctic aërial jurisdiction. Although this interest in Arctic airspace appears to be conceived in the exigencies of the present world conflict, belief in the practicability of air routes traversing the Arctic Basin and joining the great centers of civilization of the two hemispheres was expressed as long ago as shortly after the First World War. Perhaps most vocal of the exponents is the polar explorer and publicist Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who began to stress the positional significance of the Arctic almost twenty years ago.

Meanwhile the feasibility of polar aviation was demonstrated in actual practice. Following a series of experimental flights by dirigible and plane—and once the urge to attain the North Pole via the air materialized in the successful flights of Richard E. Byrd, Roald Amundsen-Lincoln Ellsworth, and Umberto Nobile in 1926 and 1928—polar flying concentrated largely upon the spanning of the Atlantic and Pacific aërial highways between the two hemispheres.

Congress established a policy for wartime radio under Section 606 of the Communications Act of 1934 when it gave the President power to take over the entire radio industry in time of war or national emergency. He took advantage of this in September, 1940, when by an executive order he created the Board of War Communications (previously the Defense Communications Board). In the 1934 act, too, he was given wide authority to suspend the FCC rules and to close stations or to use them as he saw fit. In September, 1939, when a state of “limited national emergency” was declared, there was speculation as to the effect that this section would have on the broadcasting industry. Certain Congressmen showed an inclination to back down from the principle of broad Presidential powers over radio. Representative Ditter's bill of 1940, enthusiastically supported by the broadcasting industry, was intended to curb the wide powers the Communications Act had conferred upon the President. This bill, never acted upon, would have added a provision that no transmitter might be confiscated or silenced because of the “character or contents of any program” or in order to permit the government to engage in or control broadcasting, except upon proclamation by the President that the United States was actually at war.

Previously, Congress had enacted some legislation which is pertinent to the war. In 1932, for example, a law was passed that licenses should be issued to qualified United States citizens only, and in 1941, by a new act, the Commission was enabled to consider the character and capacity of potential licensees in order to guard against “subversive” individuals.

The face-to-face war information program of the federal government came to a close on July 15, 1943. On this date the Organizations Service Division of the Office of Civilian Defense was abolished by James A. Landis, director of OCD. Thus ended the last remaining organized effort of the national government to insure full civilian understanding of the war through methods found only in democratic countries, viz., discussions, forums, town meetings, etc. This change in the conduct of the war deserves the attention of political scientists and others interested in the operations of democratic government. The way in which the program was conceived, the manner in which it was administered, as well as the deliberate way in which it was abolished, throw important light on the home-front policies of the government. They also indicate the prospects for a democratic civic education program in the United States.

Origin of the Face-to-Face War Information Program. The Organizations Service Division was established in the Office of Civilian Defense by Administrative Order No. 30, dated January 4, 1943. The face-to-face war information program, which was the primary responsibility of the Organizations Service Division, had been delegated to OCD after a series of negotiations extending from June 12 to December 15, 1942, and involving the Office of War Information; Coördinator of Inter-American Affairs, OCD, Office of Education, and the Bureau of the Budget.

During the first war year, it was to be expected that popular interest in rural local government would be subordinated, in large measure, to problems more directly connected with the national war effort. Nevertheless, vigorous prosecution of the war program has required coöperation on the part of government at all levels; and the impact of that program has been felt in various ways, both directly and indirectly, by local governmental units. Indeed, in surveying county and township government in 1942 one is inevitably impressed by the extent to which developments of the year were either the product of, or at least intensified by, wartime conditions. As in previous reviews, events will be summarized under the following headings: (1) areas; (2) organization and personnel; (3) functions; (4) finance; (5) home rule and optional charters; and (6) intergovernmental relations.

In the preparation of the trials for “war crimes” committed during the present global conflict, students of international law will indeed recognize that a milestone in the development of legal science has been reached. As will become apparent from some of the facts to be presented in this study, we are about to see a new legal principle adopted in international relations: Impossibile est quod universitas delinquat. In consonance with various plans for general postwar reconstruction, the principle so succinctly phrased by Pope Innocent IV, in times no less perturbed than the present, is finally defeating the entrenched adherents of its counterpart, first enunciated by the skilled Bartolus of Saxeferato. Individual criminals and their accomplices are to be held responsible, not “nations” or peoples.

The present war has now reached the stage when definite plans are being announced for the control and punishment of the enemy nations when they shall have been defeated. There is a strong and apparently growing sentiment among the citizens and officials of the United Nations for prosecution of the “Axis criminals” and quarantine of Axis nations. Committees of eminent scholars, some of them presumably acting under instruction from their governments, are now drawing up plans for these trials. Many individuals, however, doubt whether it will prove feasible to carry out these proposals. Others reject the whole idea of retribution or reparation against a defeated nation or its leaders as unethical and destructive of the ends for which we say we are fighting.

We wish to be neither vindictive nor gullible. Hence the popularity of suggestions that we must be prepared to give food and medicine to the people of the Axis nations during the early postwar months. But there is widespread support also for the belief that we must be ready to administer German economic and political life for some years if we wish to be sure that war will not come again from the same quarter. This balancing of generosity against sternness means, as Walter Lippmann puts it, that “our apparently contradictory war aims can be reconciled.”