WAR: ITS TECHNIQUE AND AFTERMATH
Meyer, Ernest L.
War: Its Technique And Aftermath WAR THROUGH THE AGES, by Lynn Montross. Harpers. $5. HERE COMES TOMORROW, by A. W. Zelomek. Ziff-Davis. $2. THEY DREAM OF HOME, by Niven Busch. Apple-ton-Century....
...For the decade* after peace comes he prophesies a season of spotty and transitory prosperity, but with the basic economic ills of the world still unsolved...
...Even the generals and statesmen can only speculate as to what the future may bring...
...His conclusions are not too optimistic...
...His compact volume covers the fields of business, labor, the farmers, the American home, inflation, and taxes...
...With a realism whose bleakness is relieved by passages of humor, of tenderness and compassion, Mr, Busch details what happens to five war-battered discharged Marines: Cliff Harper, a shell-shocked vet at 17...
...In discussing the art of propaganda, for example, the author has this to say about the impulse, which sent hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts into the Crusades of the Middle Ages: "It was essential that the Moslem be re-created into the archenemy of Christdendom...
...Here, then, are three "war books" of widely different pattern: from the mechanics of massacre to the peacetime results in terms of mass economy and individual maladjustment...
...Into the new creation went a pinch of fact and a wealth of imaginative detail...
...Reviewed by Ernest L. Meyer THE theme of war unites these three highly diverse books: one a history, the second an economic analysis, the third a novel...
...Cliff and Matt and Gunny have work, and even women, but the old simplicities of labor and love are not to be recaptured without a long season of torment...
...These we can solve, and in solving them support a high level of domestic activity—for perhaps a decade...
...This soul-searching and the crises it leads to make They Dream of Home a novel of dramatic and unflagging intensity...
...but there it is...
...2.75...
...Zelomek has not touched: the tremendous problem of the psychological readjustment to civilian life and labor faced by more than 10 million men and women in the armed services...
...He writes : "We are going to have a decade of prosperity for no batter reason than because the world, and that includes tm, could find no way out of its difficulties except by fighting a bloody and destructive war...
...THERE is another postwar problem upon which Mr...
...No thoughtful person can set them down without sighing, "What for, dear Lord, what for...
...It has created a few new ones, minor but pressing—the problem of relief, the problem of reconstruction, the problem of satisfying pent-up domestic demand...
...Yet here and there are illuminating sidelights, not directly bearing on the strict mechanics of warfare, but illustrating the methods by which peaceful people are aroused to the pitch of battle...
...That's not a pleasant way of putting it, and the perverted relation— evil cause, superficially good effect—is basically wrong...
...They had vowed to stick together, these five, but the memory of things learned and endured "Over There" dogs them down the highways of peace, and in the end they split into five individuals, each with his own poignant problems to solve...
...and in solving them, deceive ourselves that they are the old problems—the problem of over-production, the problem of economie inequality, the problem of racial hatreds, the problem of national rivalries—over which we are scoring a notable triumph...
...Matt Klein, a Jewish storekeeper...
...Zelomek's Here Comes Tomorrow...
...Perry Kincheloe, a Negro giant left legless by the war, and Gunny Watrous, the elderly veteran of many campaigns...
...The author, who is president of the International Statistical Bureau, Inc., looks ahead into the next 10 years and makes predictions based on present trends and past postwar experiences...
...Montross does not pretend to discuss the ethics war as an instrument...
...The great generals and the decisive battles of history are recorded and analyzed, and with the aid of maps, diagrams, and illustrations the science of military tactics comes alive for even the armchair strategist...
...to the capture of Cherbourg in 1944 A.D...
...he is concerned with the machines and not the morals of slaughter...
...In his scholarly and eminently readable narrative of the science of warfare from early days to the present, Lynn Montross packs a vast'amount of information into 900-odd pages, covering the technique of combat from Miltiades to MacArthur, from the crossbow to the tank, from the Greek phalanxes to the modern triphibious task forces...
...The veterans' dilemma is movingly examined in Niven Busch's excellent novel, They Dream of Home...
...The war has solved no problem beyond that of national self-preservation...
...Billy Tabeshaw, an Indian...
...Mr...
...and concluding that mankind can dedicate itself to no higher ideal than the dream of abolishing for all time the machines and the by-products of Mars...
...WHAT the future may bring, in terms of economics, forms the theme of Mr...
...Racial, religious, and economic prejudices all were invoked by every known medium of emotional appeal...
...Near the end he writes: "Only in the pages of history do wars end tidily, for the participants are usually torn between hope and dread, faith and doubt...
...Montross' fact-jammed volume carry the reader from the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C...
Vol. 9 • January 1945 • No. 5
