The Job

BATTLE FOR THE WORLD--Max Werner --Modern Age ($3).

HELL-BENT FOR WAR--General Hugh S. Johnson--Bobbs-Merrlll ($1.50).

UNITED WE STAND!--Hanson W. Baldwin--Whiftlesey House ($3).

Fortnight ago with the first smashing Nazi victories in the Balkans and North Africa, Americans began reading war and defense books with a new zeal. There were plenty to read, but three books were outstanding: 1) Max Werner's Battle for the World; 2) General Hugh S. Johnson's Hell-Bent for War; 3) Hanson W. Baldwin's United We Stand! Both Johnson and Baldwin are called isolationist. Their books show how rapidly the terms isolationist and interventionist are being stripped of their meaning by the necessities of U.S. defense, geared to the speed with which the Nazis daily revise war's timetables.

Battle for the World. Max Werner's name is not Max Werner. Since he has always insisted that its divulgence will bring totalitarian reprisals on his family, it has never been divulged. Asked who he is, Werner says in German: "When I write a book, I expect the book to be judged on its merits alone. As to where I was born, when I was born, what my nationality is, what political positions I may have held --these I consider are my personal concerns." Readers of Battle for the World might guess that he was a Red Army officer if his name was not Max Werner. Reviewing Werner's Military Strength of the Powers (1939), Tom Wintringham, organizer of Britain's ubiquitous People's Army, thought that Werner must be "from Central Europe." His reason: Werner's forecast for World War II ran counter to the experiences of the Spanish Civil War. Reviewer Wintringham "was appalled at the theory of warfare, the idea of what war is like, stated in and coloring all this book." Werner's theory: the tank and airplane have revolutionized warfare; trench warfare is ended; offensive strategy and tactics will aim at final destruction of the enemy. Battle for the World is Werner's documentation of his 1939 forecast from the last year of Europe's military history.

His book is notable for his total grasp of World War II and the social, political, military and diplomatic forces involved in it; for his smooth organization of his varied special knowledge. There are excellent chapters on the military preparations for World War II or the reason for the lack of them; on the diplomatic preparations, on the crisis of French and British war doctrine, on the interrelation of strategy and politics. Less convincing is Werner's analysis of the Russo-Finnish War, which turns out in Werner's hands to have been much more of a victory for Russian arms and Russian benignity than is generally supposed. According to Werner, who takes his Soviet military figures from War Commissar Klimenti Voroshilov and other Soviet sources, Russia's military strength is almost twice as great as Germany's. The future of the world depends upon Russia and the U.S. Russia, he says authoritatively, would like to join the Anglo-Saxon powers in trimming Hitler's wings. There is only one catch--to reassure Russia after the perfidy she has suffered at the hands of other Governments, it would be necessary for the U.S. to plunge in first.

Hell-Bent for War. General Hugh Samuel Johnson never calls a spade a spade if he can possibly call it a damned old shovel. He is master of the sprightly truculence peculiar to journalistic generals plus a felicity of invective all his own. But Hell-Bent for War is remarkably restrained. It is the first full-length statement of his position by an isolationist who insists he is only a realist, and whose verbal hammer-throwing at the New Deal and those who believe that the U.S. should enter World War II before it is too late, daily delights or exasperates millions of readers of his syndicated column.

His book is a series of answers, more vigorous than pungent, to a series of questions he asks in his chapter heads:

> Is Britain fighting our war? Answer: Britain is fighting her own war.

> Shall we give Britain machines or blood or both? Answer: It is a cruel deception to tell ill-informed people that this is merely a war of machines. It is and will remain, like all other wars, at the last a war of muscles, courage and cold steel. . . .

> Are we going to reconstruct the world? Answer: Having failed in the primary, basic effort of "reconstructing" America after an expenditure of fifty billions, we are now to try to reconstruct the world at a cost nobody has even taken the trouble to compute and with a probable destructive effect on our own economy which is at present becoming highly unpopular even to mention.

> Can we live in the same world with Hitler? Answer: I don't want to.

> O.K., wise guy. What better course than ours? Answer: On the face of the eight-year record--as between thee and me--almost anything.

United We Stand! Hanson Weight-man Baldwin is the New York Times's military writer (he does not like to be called an expert). If Baldwin were simply talking to his readers instead of writing a book, he would probably say: If you want to go to war against Nazi Germany, go in now. If you don't want to go to war against Germany, don't go in now. But make up your mind.

He trusts Americans to do what they have to once they have taken a good look at their situation. His book is intended to help them take that look.

One issue on which almost all Americans can agree at once, says Baldwin, is hemisphere defense. He does not mean the passive defense of which the Maginot, Mannerheim and Metaxas Lines are the tragic symbols. Passive defense, he claims, is one of the things that destroyed France, came near to destroying England. The U.S. and its Latin American allies must not just sit tight behind the oceans and wait to be coventrized. Hemisphere defense must be aggressive defense. It must base itself on the British bastion as long as that bastion can hold out. This means continued aid to Britain without stint, but also without skimping vital U.S. needs.

Behind the British bastion, hemisphere defense must rely on: 1) slowly augmenting U.S. air and naval forces; 2) naval and air bases from Greenland to the River Plate, from Alaska to Chile and as far east in the Atlantic as the Azores. Baldwin insists that defense of the hemispheric eastern coastline is impracticable until the U.S. has a base in the hump of Brazil. But until there is a unified hemispheric strategy, a unified U.S. command, a unified U.S. production plan, says Baldwin, defense effort will be hit or miss, with a dangerous percentage of misses.

United We Stand! includes some plain talk about the plight of national defense, the present state of defense industry. Some of Baldwin's statements may be challenged though it seems unlikely that many will be challenged successfully. Some of his openhanded slaps at the Administration may start thunderheads crashing in high places. Some readers will be dismayed by his reports of defense lags during a year that has seen Europe conquered from Norway to Greece because of inadequate defenses. But most readers reading his book and the war news will find his viewpoint realistic, sturdy, fearless.

The soldierly tone of his book will remind Americans that, even if they have forgotten it in peacetime, they are one of the world's great warrior nations, that the whole continental seaboard is a great field of their battles from Quebec and Louisburg to Chapultepec; that the pitting of Americans against Americans resulted in the world's most terrible battles until World War I--on the rolling farmlands of Gettysburg, in the narrow valley of Antietam Creek, on the hills at Chickamauga, in the oak and pine thickets of Virginia's Wilderness.

Out of the emotional surge that made the Civil War possible came the one great U.S. cultural burst--Emerson and Whitman, the Lincoln speeches and the Lincoln legend, and great war songs such as The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Americans will know what Author Baldwin meant when he wrote: "This is our job: to transmute our potential strength into dynamic energy, into the fighting ships and planes and guns and men we need until the raucous voice of America--the voice of Walt Whitman and The Rail Splitter, of George Washington and the gentle Lee, the voice of the blue-jeaned, 'baccy-chewing field hand, the voice of the East Side and the steel mill--the hoarse, harsh voice of America whistles down the winds of the world and is heard in the far corners of the earth. This is our job."

Supplementing these books are reports from many another front on the worldwide battlefield:

THIS IS LONDON--Edward R. Murrow --Simon & Schuster ($2). Selections from the London broadcasts of CBS's famed radio correspondent.

A LONDON DIARY--Quentin Reynolds--Random House ($2). Uncensored, unedited journal of a top-flight U.S. foreign correspondent during the London Blitzkrieg.

TURKEY -- Emil Lengyel -- Random House ($3.75). Readable, historical, political, social and economic Baedeker to the country which may be the next Nazi battlefield.

CANADA FIGHTS--Edited by John W. Dafoe--Farrar & Rinehart ($2). Canada's war effort described by a group of five Canadian journalists and a professor under the editorship of "the most eminent living Canadian."

GERMANY PREPARES FOR WAR --Ewald Banse -- Harcourt, Brace ($3). Re-issue of German Military Science Professor Banse's blueprint for World War II, first published in 1932 when it was called "senseless babblings."

AXIS AMERICA -- Robert Strausz-Hupe--Putnam ($2.50). Nazi plans for the U.S. based on published Nazi intentions interpreted by a former Viennese who is an associate editor of Current History, lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania.

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