for the

are equally to be accepted by everyone; in democracy Hitler finds a deplorable tendency to shrink from rationing and to encourage deviations from the established principles of biochemistry. This, he says, weakens the State; for one thing it leads to endless discussion. (Hitler is an orator, not a debater; dislike of letting other people talk is natural; his passion for action on a world-scale, immense in space, enduring for al

lit us apart, like cannel coal. He has tried to turn dissent into disunion-and he has been helped

of disagreement; even when war came, we confused the areas of human action in

rences, we began to encourage him by actively intensifying all our disagreements;

production had been

ons had been put into practise s

f vital raw mate

vital war machiner

ance of the war had become an int

s of attack had become an integrated

none the less, failed. For the purpose of disruption in America was to paralyze our will, to p

nts mean that we continue to search; they mean that we do not rule out improvement after we have accepted a machine or a method. (We carried this "dissent" to an extreme in "yearly models"

Can't U

r. So far as war touches the composition of women's stockings or children's ice-cream sodas, we need unified organization in the domestic field; but not "total government". We have to be told (since it is not a matter of individual taste) how many flavors of ice-cream may be manufactured; but the regimentation of people is no

collapsed on them in 1929. We are conditioned by the angry and excited controversy over the New Deal; we are opinionated, variant, prejudiced, individual, argumentative. We cannot be changed over to the German model. Perhaps in a quieter moment we could be captivated (if not captured) by an American-type dictato

f unity). I do not mean five admirals disputing command of one fleet or one assembly line ordered to make three wholly different aeroplane engines

t out of this freedom would come a steady progress, a definite betterment of our State; so, we have been taught, the human rac

nd we can not avoid it by taking it in homeopathic doses

being made every day by men in the factories and in the field; instinctively they follow the technique of variety because it

an never defeat him by striking with our weakest arm against his strongest. And our strong point is the variety, the freedom, the independence of ou

ler a W

out our adversary, falling back when we have to, lunging forward in another place or on another level; for this war is being fought on several planes at once, and if we are not strong enough today on one, we can fight on another; we are, in fact, fighting steadily on the production front, intermittently on the V (or foreign-propaganda) front, on

the tank and the Stuka and the parachute troop were separate alien inventions combined by the German High Command; but combinations of various arms is not an exclusively German conception. The new concept in this war is ten years old, it is the sacrifice of a nation to its army, the creation of mass-munitions, the concentration on offensive striking power. All of these are successful against broken and betrayed armies in France, against small armies unsupported by tanks and planes

the German system of the trench, the bombardment, and the breakthrough. He tried it with the tank; he tried it at Gallipoli; finally the Allies tried it, half-heartedly, at Salonika. The war, on Germany's terms, was a stalemate and Germany might have broken through; the war ended because the balance was dislocated when America came in and, simultaneously, both England and America began to fight the war a

from

to us. Analogies are dangerous, but there is a sense in which war is a chess game (as chess is a war game). White opens with Queen's pawn to Qu 3, and Black recognizes the gambit. He can accept or decline. If

t of humanity, in order to defeat him. And the public statements of our leaders have necessarily concealed any new plan of attack; in fact we have heard chiefly of super-fascist production, implyi

scovers our native natural strategy of civil action in the war, the army will be constantly recruiting anti-fascists, will live in an atmosphere of inventive anti-fascism, and therefore will never completely fall under the spell of the enemy's tac

e both beside the point; civilians do not need text books on tactics; they need to know the nature of warfare. They needed desperately to know in February, 1942, why General MacArthur was performing a useful function in Bataan and why bombers were not sent to his aid; and this information came to them from the President. But the President is not the only one who can tell civilians how long it takes to transport a divi

ary M

recently the commentator on strategy was as obscure and difficult as a music critic, and despatches from the field as obscure as prescriptions in Latin. It is supposed that doctors wrote in Latin not only because it was an exact and universal language, but because it was not understood by laymen, so it ga

ime, for the right length of time; you have to combine the various kinds of force at your disposal, and arrange a schedule, as there is a schedule for chassis and body work in a motor car factory, so that the right chassis is in the right place as its body is lowered upon it; you have to stop or go on, according to judgments based on information. The terrifying decisions, the choice of place and time, the selection of instruments, the allocation of power to several points, are made by the high command on the grand scale or by a sergeant if his officer is shot down; and the right judgments distinguish the great commander or the good platoon leader from the second rate. The civilian, without information, cannot decide what to do; but

cause our lives depend on them, we can no longer depend on the strategy of Gustavus Adolphus or the diplomacy of Metternich. Five million soldiers in khaki, with a nation's life disrupted for their support, require a different

with some poignancy, that taxes are paid by people like ourselves and we are beginning to know that taxes are spent to keep people alive and healthy and in jobs and, to a minute extent, also to keep people cheerful, their minds alert, their spirits buoyant. The very fact tha

knew more. What I have learned, from many sources, seems to hold together and to demonstrate one thing: behind strategy in the field is a str

nnot pretend that it is an accepted idea; it is hardly more than a name for an attitude of mind; but I did find authority for the feeling that an

ty of S

biographer and student of politics; both British. Although there are some difficult pages and some odd conclusions, this book is a revelation-particularly it shows the connection between war and the social conditions of nations making war; in the authors' own words, "war and society condit

tion, its education, its religion, its banking and commercial habits, and its whole social organization. Napoleon's solution was based on the revolutionary enthusiasm of the French people; he added zeal, the intense application of force, speed of movement, repeated

ntil they were ready at Waterloo) and let Napoleon find their weak spot for the exercise of his force. Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, but the turning point came years earlier at Torres Vedras in Spain; as Napoleon increased force, W

in any way not natural to the British; his masterly retreats did not disturb the "inborn toughness and phlegm, that saving lack of imagination" which makes the British, as these British authors say, "good at retreats". Moreover, this war of slow retreats gave Britain time to develop a tremendous manufacturing powe

s its name from the battle of London; but it refers to all sorts of defensive operations-a bullet is shot into sand and the dislodged grains of sand form themselves again so that the next bullet has the same depth of sand to go through-unless the bullets come so fast in "synchronized timing" or blitzkrieg that the sand hasn't time to close over the gap again. The defense "demands that every person in the nation be capable of sticking to his task even without detailed orders from others, regardless of the odds

l change affects the kind of war we can fight, the kind we must discover for ourselves if we are to defeat an enemy who has chosen his style and is trying to impose it on us. The analysis of Hitler's war-style must be left to experts; if its essence is "synchronized timing", our duty is to find a way of upsetting the time-table, not only by months, but by minutes. Possibly the style developed by Stalin can do both-by pulling back into the vast spaces of Russia, Stalin created a battlefield without shape or definition, which may have prevented the correlation of the parts of Hitler's armies; by encouraging guerillas, he may have upset the timing of i

o different; in the opening phases there was no choice and the Japanese forced us to accept their way of making war. Their way, it appears, is appropriate to their beliefs, their requirements in food, their capacity to imitate Europe, and dozens of other factors, not precisely similar to ours. Their experience and outlook in life and ideas of honor may lead to the suicide bomber; ours do not. Our dive bombers feel no shame if they miss a target; they have a duty which is to save their ships and retur

ction of our high command to translate what we can do best into a practical military strategy. The civilian's function is to provide the physical and moral strength needed to support the forces in the field

e tactics of variety into terms of propaganda