Proclaim Liberty! Part 2

_Has. .h.i.tler a Weakness?_

In the face of the stupendous victories of Germany, it is hard to say that Hitler's army has a weak spot; but it did not take London or Moscow in its first attempts, nor Suez. Somewhere in this formidable strength a weakness is to be discovered; it will not be discovered by us if we are intimidated into imitation. We have to be flexible, feeling 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 front of domestic stability, on the financial front (in connection with the United Nations); and the war front itself is divided into military and naval (with air in each) and transport; our opportunity is to win by creating our own most effective front, and keep hammering on it while we get ready to fight on the ones our enemies have chosen.

Every soldier feels the difference between his own army and any other; every general or statesman knows that the kind of war a nation fights rises out of the kind of nation it is. This is the form of strategy which the layman has to understand--in self-defense against the petrified mind which either will not change the methods of the last war, or will sc.r.a.p everything in order to imitate the enemy. The layman knows something of warfare now, because the layman is in it. He knows that 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 ma.s.s-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; they are not entirely successful against huge armies, fighting under trusted leaders, for a civilization they love, an army of individual heroes, supported by guerillas on one side, and an incalculable production power on the other. Possibly the Soviet Union has discovered one weakness in the German war-strategy; it may not be the weakness through which we can strike; we may have to find another. We have to find the weakness of j.a.pan, too--and we are not so inclined to imitate them.

There is a famous picture of Winston Churchill, hatless in the street, with a napkin in his hand, looking up at the sky; it was in Antwerp in 1914 and Churchill had left his dinner to see enemy aircraft in the sky--an omen of things to come. At Antwerp Churchill had tried to head off the German swing to the sea, but Antwerp was a defeat and Churchill returned to London, still looking for some way to refuse 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 also on the propaganda level. By that time Churchill was "discredited"; he had tried to shorten the war by two years and the British forces, with success in their hands, had failed to strike home, failed to send the one more battles.h.i.+p, the one more division which would have insured victory--because Kitchener and the War Office and the French High Command wanted to keep on fighting the war in the German way.

_Escape from Despair_

The desperation which overcomes the inexpert civilian at the thought of fighting the military machines of Germany and j.a.pan is justified _only_ if we propose to fight them on their terms, in the way they propose to us. a.n.a.logies 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 p.a.w.n to Qu 3, and Black recognizes the gambit. He can accept or decline. If he accepts, it is because he thinks he can fight well on that basis, but Black can also reject White's plan of campaign. The good player is one who can break out of the strategy which the other tries to impose.

We have felt ourselves incapable of fighting Hitler because we hate Hitlerism and we do not want to think as he does, feel as he does, act as he does--with more horror, more cruelty, more debas.e.m.e.nt 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, implying our acceptance of the fascist tactics in the field; the best we can expect is that soon we, not they, will take the offensive. If this were all, it would still leave us fighting the fascist war.

The civilian's totally untrained dislike of this prospect is of considerable importance because it is a parallel to the citizen's authoritative and decisive objection to the Hitlerian strategy of propaganda; and if the civilian holds out, if he discovers 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 tactics. That is why it is important for the citizen to know that he is right. _We do not have to fight Hitler in his way_; that is what Hitler wants us to do, because _if we do we can not win_. There is another way--although we may not have found it yet.

In its celebrated "orientation course" the United States army explains the strategy of the war to every one of its soldiers, not to make them strategists, but to make them better soldiers. The civilian needs at least as much knowledge so that he is not over-elated by a stroke of luck or too cast down by disaster. The jokes about amateur strategists and the High Command's justifiable resentment of ignorant criticism are 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 division and put it into action; how air and sea power interact; what a beach action involves; and a few other facts which would allay impatience and give the worker in the factory some sense of the importance of his work. The civilian in war work or out of it should know something about war, and in particular he should know that there are several kinds of war, one of which is correct and appropriate and effective for us.

_Military Mummery_

It might be a good thing if some of the mumbo-jumbo about military strategy were reduced to simple terms, so that the civilians, whose lives and fortunes and sacred honor are involved, would know what is happening to them. The military mind, aided by the military expert, loves to use special terms; until 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 gave mystery and authority to their prescriptions. Latin is still not understood, but the simple art of advertising has destroyed a vast amount of business for the doctors because ads in English persuaded the ignorant to use quack remedies and patent and proprietary medicines, without consulting the doctor.

A rebellion like this against the military mind may occur; experts are now writing for the popular press, and talking in elementary terms to millions by radio. They cannot teach the techniques of correlated tank and air attack any more than music critics can teach the creation of head tones. But they can expound the fundamentals--and so expose the military leaders.h.i.+p to the _criticism it desperately needs_ if it is to function properly. The essentials of warfare are dreadfully simple--the production manager of any great industrial concern deals with most of them every day. You have to get materials and equipment; train men to use certain tools and instruments; bring power to bear at chosen points, in sufficient quant.i.ty, at the right time, 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 cha.s.sis and body work in a motor car factory, so that the right cha.s.sis 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, as Britain's _civilian_ courts of inquiry have shown, he can tell whether the right decisions have been made. He can tell as well as the greatest commander, that indecision and dispersion of forces made success at the Dardanelles impossible in 1916; or that lack of a unified plan of tank attack made the wreck of France certain in 1940. The civilian American who has taken a hundred detours on motor roads can understand even the purely military elements of a flanking movement; the industrial American need not be baffled by the problems of fire-power, coordination, or supply.

We can understand the war if the mystery is stripped away, and if we are allowed to understand that the wrong strategy is as fatal to us as the wrong prescription.

I believe that we will have to strip the false front from international diplomacy, from warfare, from all the inherited "mysteries" which are still pre-Revolutionary in essence. We will have to bring these things up to date because 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 strategy from that of Burgoyne's hired Hessians; and a hundred and thirty million individuals simply do not want the intrigue and Congress-dances diplomacy which traded territory, set up kings, and found pretexts for good wars.

We have destroyed a good deal of the mummery of economics--not without help; politics has become more familiar to us, we now know that a thief in office is a thief, that tariffs are not made by abstract thinkers, but by manufacturers and farmers and factory workers; we know, 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 that we are now _all_ critics of spending is a great advance, because it means we are all paying; when we are all critics of foreign policy it will mean that we are all signing contracts with other nations; and when we are all critics of war, it will mean that we are all fighting.

As a student, I know what a layman can know about strategy; less about tactics; as a citizen I should be of greater service to my country if I 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 strategy of a people in action; and victory comes to the leaders who organize and use the national forces in keeping with the national character.

I have gone to several authorities to discover whether the "tactics of variety" (a "natural" in propaganda) has any counterpart in the field.

I cannot pretend that it is an accepted idea; it is hardly more than a name for an att.i.tude of mind; but I did find authority for the feeling that an American (or United Nations) strategy need not be--and must not be--the strategy of Hitler. So much the civilian can take to his bosom, for comfort.

_A Variety of Strategies_

The greatest comfort to myself was in a little book published just in time to corroborate a few guesses and immensely to widen my outlook; it is called _Grand Strategy_; the authors are H.A. Sargeaunt, a specialist in poison gas and tank design, a scientist and historian; and Geoffrey West, 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 condition each other"; they connect war with progress and show how each nation can develop a strategy out of its own resources. The hint we all got at school, that the French revolution is responsible for vast civilian armies, is carried into a history of the nineteenth century--and into this war.

The authors have their own names for each kind of war--each is a "solution" to the problem of victory. Each adds a special factor to the body of strategy known at the time, and this added special factor rises from the country which uses it--from its methods of production, 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 hammering, throwing in reserves. All of these things demand devotion, patriotic self-sacrifice, and these qualities had been created, for the French, by the Republic; they were not qualities known to the mercenaries and small standing armies of Napoleon's enemies.

Against Napoleon's total use of the strategy of force, the British opposed a strength based on the way they lived; it was a sea-strength of blockade, but also on land they refused to accept the challenge of Napoleon. They would not come out (until 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, Wellington increased "persistence"; it is called the "strategy of attrition" and it means that Wellington's "aim was to wear down the enemy troops by inducing them to attack [where Wellington] could withdraw to take up positions and fight again."

Today, getting news of a campaign like Wellington's in Spain, the average man would repeatedly read and hear headlines of retreat; he would get the impression of an uninterrupted series of defeats. But the Peninsular War was actually a triumph for British arms. It was a triumph because Wellington refused to fight 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 power, to organize the blockade of Napoleon and the merchant fleet for supply to Spain. The whole history of modern England, its acceptance of the factory system, its naval supremacy, its relation to the Continent, and its internal reforms--all rise from the kind of war Wellington made, and the kind he refused to make.

For the curious, the later "solutions" are: under Bismark and Moltke, increased training and use of equipment and material resources; under Hitler, "synchronized timing" (connected with air-power and the impossibility of large-scale surprise; also connected with "alertness and intelligence" in the individual soldier, a frightening development under a totalitarian military dictators.h.i.+p); and finally, under Churchill, "the national sandbag defense", increasing "usable morale and initiative". Sandbag defense gets 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 against him and though it may mean certain death. _Every_ person--not merely the trained minority. This happened at Dunkirk...." At Dunkirk the grains of sand were hundreds of small yachts, motor boats, trawlers, coasting vessels, many of which were taken to the dreadful beach by civilians virtually without orders; some of them became ferry-boats, taking men off the sh.o.r.e to the transports which could not get close enough, going back and forth, without stop--the grains of sand reforming until an army was rescued.

These examples drive home the principle that a form or style of warfare must be found by each nation corresponding to the state of the nation _at that time_; the "psychology" of the nation may remain constant for a century, but the way to make war will change if the methods of production have changed. If the nation has lost (or won) colonies, if education has reached the poor, if child labor has ended (so that youths of eighteen are strong enough for tank duty), if women are without civil rights, if a wave of irreligion or political illiberality has swept over the country--if any vital change has occurred, the style of war must change also. Every social 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 s.p.a.ces 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 individual soldiers, tanks, and planes. The success of the Eighth Route Army in China was based on a totally different military style, the only completely Communist style on record; for the army was successful because it built a Communist society on the march, actually and literally, establis.h.i.+ng schools, manufacturing arms, bearing children, and fighting battles at the same time, so that at the end of several years the army had extricated itself from a trap, crossed and recrossed miles of enemy territory, reformed itself with more men and arms than it had at the beginning--and had operated as a center of living civilization for hundreds of thousands.

The operations of Chiang Kai Chek against the j.a.panese are another example of rejecting the enemy's style; over the enormous terrain of China, the defending armies could scatter and hide from aircraft; the cities fell or were gutted by fire; but the people moved around them, the armies remained. j.a.pan's attack on Britain and ourselves began with islands, where the lesson of China could not be applied; and the islands were dependencies, not free nations like China, so the psychology of defense was also different; in the opening phases there was no choice and the j.a.panese 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 s.h.i.+ps and return for another try; it is against the whole natural tradition of the west that a man should kill himself for the honor of a ruler; we would not send out an army with orders to gain honor by death, as we prefer to gain honor by victory. So in the true sense it would be suicidal for us to imitate the j.a.panese; our heroism-to-the-death is the arrival, at the final moment, of a last reserve of courage and devotion; it is not a planned bravery, nor a communal devotion, it is as private as liberty--or death.

Our heroism rises out of our lives. Our science of victory will have to be based on our lives, too, on the way we manufacture, play games, read newspapers, eat and drink and bring up children. It is the function 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.

Here the civilian is qualified to make certain demands, because we know where our intellectual and moral strength lies; we can work to keep the tactics of variety operative in the field of public emotion.

The next two chapters are a translation of the tactics of variety into terms of propaganda and its objective, which is unity of action.

CHAPTER III

United...?

When I began to write this book the unity "made in j.a.pan" was beginning to wear thin; when I finished people were slowly accustoming themselves to a new question: they did not know whether an illusion of unity was better than no unity at all.

We know now that we were galvanized into common action by the shock of attack; but to recoil from a blow, to huddle together for self-protection, to cry for revenge--are not the signs of a national unity. Before the war was three months old it was clear that we were not united on any question; while we all intended to win the war, the new appeasers had arrived--who wanted to buy themselves off the consequences of war by not fighting it boldly; or by fighting only j.a.pan; or fighting j.a.pan only at Hawaii; we disagreed about the methods of warfare and the purpose of victory; there were those who wanted the war won without aid from liberals and those who would rather the war were lost than have labor contribute to victory; and those who seemed more interested in preventing profit than in creating munitions; it was a great chance "to put something over"--possibly the radicals could be destroyed, possibly the rich; possibly the President or his wife could be trapped into an error, possibly a sales tax would prevent a new levy on corporations, possibly labor could maneuvre itself into dominance; the requirements of war could be a good excuse for postponing all new social legislation and slily dropping some of the less vital projects; and the inescapable regimentation of millions of people, the necessary propaganda among others, could be used as an opportunity for new social experiments and indoctrination. In these differences and in the bitterness of personal dislike, people believed that the war could not be won unless their separate purposes were also fulfilled; our activities were not designed to fit with one another, and we were like ionized particles, held within a framework, but each pulling away from the others.

The attack on Pearl Harbor silenced the pacifists; not even the most misguided could suggest that the President had maneuvred j.a.pan into the attack; the direct cause of the war, including the war which Italy and Germany declared on us, was self-protection. We were not fighting for England, for the Jews, for the munition makers. But did we know what we _were_ fighting for? The President had said that we did not intend to be constantly at the mercy of aggressors; and the Atlantic Charter provided a rough sketch of the future. But we did not know whether we were to be allied with Britain, reconstruct Europe, raise China to dominance in the Far East, enter a supernational system, withdraw as we did at the end of the last war, or simply make ourselves the rulers of the world.

Matching our casual uncertainty was the dead-shot clear-minded intention of our enemies--to conquer, to subjugate, to rule; by forgetting all other aims, eliminating all private purposes; by putting aside whatever the war did not require and omitting nothing necessary for victory; by making war itself the great social experiment, using war to destroy morals, habits and enterprises which did not help the war, destroying, above all, the prejudices, the rights, the character of civilized humanity as we have known them.

Have we a source of unity which can oppose this totality? According to Hitler, we have not: we are a nation of many races and people; we are a capitalist country divided between the rich and the poor; we break into political parties; we reject leaders.h.i.+p; we are given up to private satisfactions and do not understand the sacrifices which unity demands.

Therefore, in the Hitlerian prophecy, America needs only to be put under the slightest tension and it will fall apart.

The strains under which people live account for their strength as well as their weakness; we are strong in another direction precisely because we are not "unified" in the n.a.z.i sense. Actually the n.a.z.is have no conception of unity; their purpose is totality, which is not the same thing at all. A picture or a motor has unity when all the _different_ parts are arranged and combined to produce a specific effect; but a canvas all painted the same shade of blue has no unity--it is a totality, a total blank; there is no unity in a thousand ball-bearings; they are _totally_ alike.

If the n.a.z.i argument is not valid, why did we first thank j.a.pan for unity, and then discover that we had no unity? Why were we pulling against one another, so that in the first year of the war we were distracted and ineffective, as France had been? If outright pacifism was our only disruptive element, why didn't we, after we were attacked, embrace one another in mutual forgiveness, high devotion to our country, and complete harmony of purpose? Months of disaster in the Pacific and the grinding process of reorganizing for production at home left us unaware of the sacrifices we had still to make, and at the mercy of demagogues waiting only for the right moment to start a new appeas.e.m.e.nt. Perhaps next summer, when the American people won't get their motor trips to the mountains and the lakes; perhaps next winter when coal and oil may not be delivered promptly; perhaps when the first casualty lists come in....

We were not a united people and were not mature enough, in war years, to face our disunion. When we become mature we will discover that unity means agreement as to purpose, consent as to methods, and willingness to function. All the parts of the motor car have to do their work, or the car will not run well; that is their unity; and our unity will bring every one of us jobs to do for which we have to prepare. We can remember Pearl Harbor with banners and diamond clasps, but until we forget Pearl Harbor and do the work which national unity requires of us, we will still be children playing a war game--and still persuading ourselves that we can't lose.

_The Background of Disunion_

In the urgency of the moment no one asked how it happened that the United States were not a united people. No one wondered what had happened to us in the past twenty years to make religious and racial animosities, political heresy-hunts, and cla.s.s hatreds so common that they were used not only by demagogues, but by men responsible to the nation. No one asked whether the unity we had always a.s.sumed was ever a real thing, not a politician's device, for use on national holidays only. And, when the disunion of the people's leaders began to be apparent, and the people began to be ill-at-ease--then they were told to remember Pearl Harbor, or that we were all united really, but were helping our country best by constructive criticism. The fatal circ.u.mstance of our disunity we dared not face. No one who _could_ unite the people was willing to work out the basis of unity--and everyone left it to the President, as if in the strain of battle, a general were compelled to orate to the troops. The President's work was to win over our enemies; it should not have been necessary for him to win us over, too.

The situation is grave because we have no tradition of early defeat and ultimate victory; we have no habit of national feeling, so that when hards.h.i.+ps fall on us we feel alone, and victimized. We do not know what "all being in the same boat" really signifies; we will, of course, pull together if we are s.h.i.+pwrecked; but the better way to win wars is to avoid s.h.i.+pwrecks, not to survive them.

We cannot improvise a national unity; we can only capitalize on gusts of anger or jubilation, from day to day--these are the tactics of war propaganda, not its grand strategy. For our basic unity we have to go where it already exists, we have to uncover a great mother-lode of the true metal, where it has always been; we have to _remind_ ourselves of what we have been and are, so that our unity will come from within ourselves, and not be plastered on like a false front. For it is only the strength inside us that will win the war and create a livable world for us when we have won it.

We have this deep, internal, mother-lode of unity--in our history, our character, and our destiny. We are awkward in approaching it, because in the past generation we have falsified our history and corrupted our character; the men now in training camps grew up between the Treaty of Versailles and the crash of 1929; they lived in the atmosphere of normalcy and debunking; of the Ku Klux Klan and Bolshevism; of boom and charity; and it is not surprising that they were, at first, bewildered by the sudden demands on their patriotism.