Sascha's Show

In Hollywood last summer Walt Disney, restless creator of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and many another cinanimal, was playing mental tiddlywinks with the idea of putting together a monthly animated-cartoon digest, roughly analogous in the motion-picture field to the spectacularly successful Reader's Digest.

Digging for suggestions, he browsed through a copy of the Digest, came upon a condensation of Victory Through Air Power, the brash, controversial best-seller dashed off by Major Alexander P. ("Sascha") de Seversky to advertise his passionate belief that the war can best be won by bombing planes of unprecedented size and range, wielded by an independent air command.

The cartoon digest notion never got out of swaddling clothes, but Disney's imagination had been kindled by Seversky's vivid word pictures of what air war could, and would, be like in the immediate future. He arranged a meeting with Sascha, and the two men set to work to translate the book into film. The resulting Disney-Seversky Victory Through Air Power will open in New York next week, then be distributed nationally by United Artists.

As it stands, the picture is 65 minutes of highly unorthodox film fare, and an exceedingly potent instrument of propaganda for untrammeled (and not yet existent) air power. It may drop with the effect of an incendiary bomb into the long-smoldering argument on whether the U.S. should have a separate Air Force, ranking with the Army and Navy and independent of their control.

Just what U.S. military authorities thought of the project was impossible to learn. Hollywood rumors, sifted down, indicated that Disney had received some politely unofficial suggestions that the book really wasn't good picture material. Apparently no stronger pressure was applied. Disney, at any rate, did not produce the picture in a military vacuum; his studio's main job now is turning out war training films, and he has ample contact with the armed forces.

Disney Technique. Movie audiences will see in Victory an odd blending of 1) pure Disney cartoon fun, 2) the action, draughtsmanship and color of his feature-length films, 3) superbly contrived maps and animated diagrams, 4) perhaps too much of Seversky in a handsome office, driving home his arguments.

After a brief dedication to the late Brigadier General "Billy" Mitchell, evangelist and martyr of the air-power cause (who would have given his right arm for a movie like Victory to carry his message to the people), the film swings into a lighthearted cartoon history of aviation, starting in 1903 with the Wright Brothers' first powered flight (12 seconds; 120 ft.).

Seversky Technique. Preliminaries over, Sascha de Seversky gets right to the point, drilling at the idea that air power has created a new way of winning wars, by jumping over the enemy's army and navy to strike directly at his war industries and thus paralyze him at the source of his power. He has only scorn for "military men of the old school" who fail to understand this new weapon. The film vividly depicts the failure of French land power, of British sea power in Norway and Crete. Only at Dunkirk and in the Battle of Britain was the string of German triumphs checked; that, as Seversky explains it, was because the Luftwaffe, primarily trained to clear the way for ground forces, met its master in the R.A.F., an air force truly designed for air combat.

Yet now the Allies have learned the lesson. Can they go on to win simply by raising bigger armies, by outbuilding and crushing the enemy with planes and tanks? Seversky thinks not. He bases his opinions on geographic facts. The Axis powers, he explains, are fighting on interior lines, with relatively short, straight channels of supply. Allied lines of communication are strung out all over the globe, along risky and roundabout routes.

Victory Technique. Seversky likens Germany to an iron wheel whose rim (the fighting fronts) is supported by straight spokes (supply lines) radiating from a central hub (war industry). So long as the Allies pound at the rim the enemy can always move his power to meet the impact. By striking at the hub with air power, they can collapse the whole structure; then the surface forces can move in to clinch the victory, with a vast saving of life.

Present-day bombers, with their striking radius of 1,000 miles, may be able to carry out the job of cracking up Germany, Seversky says, but they can scarcely do the trick against Japan, with a sphere of domination three times that of Germany.

Major de Seversky's formula for victory over Japan is the merciless bombing of Japanese industrial centers by super-long-range aircraft based in Alaska. He and Disney combine in a crashing finale showing the huge bombers, bristling with guns aimed by range finders which blast down any fighter planes that approach them, carrying bombs of unheard-of power and destruction. Such planes will be built, Seversky says, and the U.S. is the only nation in a position to tool up and build them right away. (Sascha's critics answer that argument with the comment: "You can't win this war with the next war's airplanes.")

As must be expected in a highly topical film, Seversky has his muffs and his good catches. Perhaps he overplays the submarine's future menace--although it is too soon to be sure of that. On the other hand, he has a prophetic sequence showing the mining and destruction of an enemy power dam, made six months before the R.A.F. wrecked the Moehne and Eder dams.

When his picture has gone the rounds, Sascha de Seversky may find that his most telling points were negative ones; that people will be most impressed, not with what he says the U.S. can do in the air, but rather with what he insists that it can not do over land and sea routes. The film's one most valuable service may be to show millions of Americans, in the most graphic possible form, the true complexity of U.S. grand strategy, the tremendous difficulties of fighting a war all over the face of the earth.

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