BUT NO PEACE

...mostly they try to explain and defend major decisions which were to have so fateful an impact on postwar settlements, or the failure to achieve settlements...

...Roosevelt's reluctant approval (but behind Cordell Hull's back), and how Yalta was the logical climax of the peace that was destined to fail...

...Our costliest mistakes, Baldwin argues with considerable fervor, were Mr...

...Certain results were intrinsic in the character of the war itself," for, as Neumann points out, total war, mass bombing, and the formula of unconditional surrender could only lead to the aggrandize^ ment of the one power on the continent capable of taking over— Soviet Russia...

...The long view, the greater good of the greatest number, a desire is world tranquilization and peace have never characterized absolut rulers...

...Neumann's conclusion emphasizes that World War II was "a coalition war, fought by dissimilar powers with conflicting interests and often with no more in common than their interest in stopping German expansion...

...Baldwin, turning his heaviest firepower on the Roosevelt Administration, argues that some of its wartime decisions lengthened the war, made its conduct more difficult, and contributed greatly to losing the peace...

...Baldwin passes somber judgment on the basic ingredients of American policy...

...Baldwin's principal complaint is that, unlike the British and the Russians, we fought the war "with no grand design or over-all concept" of what kind of world we wanted after the war...

...II Hanson Baldwin abandons his usually calm manner for a scorching attack on some of the major American policies in Great Mistakes of the War...

...While the war is on, we give help to anyone who can kill a Hun...

...Baldwin concludes: "Such mistakes as those outlined in these pages—the attempt to find total victory, to inflict absolute destruction, to use unlimited means, and to mistake military victory for political victory—have been heretofore in history the peculiar characteristics of totalitarian or dictator-led states...

...This time, however—in World War II—these policies did, he are gues, lure American leadership into waging a war that could bring no peace...

...A lively, readable, and immensely informative analysis of the whole course of American and Allied diplomacy, it is, in effect, the distillation of most of the major materials in the official records and assorted memoirs, presented in simple, easy-to-read fashion for the layman as well as the scholar...

...Neumann records the story in dead-pan manner for the most part, letting the official facts and the reports of the participants speak for themselves...

...Neumann's Making The Peace is an especially valuable addition to our library on wartime diplomacy...

...There have been scores of tomes bearing millions of words, but only a half dozen or so have helped greatly to illuminate the decisive chapters of Allied strategy and diplomacy closed to the public during the conduct of total war...

...These two little books, one by William Neumann, director of the Foundation for Foreign Affairs, and the other by Hanson Baldwin, military editor of the New York Times, lack the pretentiousness of most of the more ballyhooed tomes of those who wear the brass, or braid, or striped-pants, but they make an enormously useful contribution to the search for truth about our war aims and peace plans...

...Out of these many bits and pieces, carefully assembled on the broader canvas of the struggle itself, Neumann shows how basic conflict over aims and principles among the Allies broke out at the very beginning, how the Atlantic Charter was doomed to "have a fate no better-than the 14 Points of Wilson," how the Soviet Union's territorial aspirations in Central Europe became clearly visible as early as December, 1941, how Britain and Russia proceeded to a division of spheres and spoils in the Balkans with Mr...

...On Feb, 27, 1945, he told Parliament that two principles were guiding his approach to the problems of the Continent...

...Reviewed by Morris H. Rubin THE torrent of diplomatic and military memoirs . has reached flood-tide in the five years since World War II...

...The reason for the failure of western diplomacy is made even clearer by Winston Churchill himself...

...when the war is over we look to the solution of a free, unfettered democratic election.' To believe that those who claimed to have killed the most Huns would not also look to solutions of their own was the greatest delusion under which British and American statesmanship could fall...

...He takes a pretty dim view of our resort to all-out, total strategy, although he does not make clear how, given some of the facts of life of the time, the approach could have been greatly changed...

...Roosevelt's development of "Unconditional Surrender" as the goal in the war against Germany, our failure to support Winston Churchill's proposal for a Balkan invasion, our decision to let the Russians move into certain key areas of Germany and Eastern Europe, our insistence that the Soviet Union join us in a war we had won against Japan, and the needless, immoral dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki...

...Many of the works which have reached us thus far are official or semi-official...