General Fuller Reviews the War

AMERICAN admirers of Major-General J. F. C. Fuller’s stimulating and often exciting military studies (and this reviewer is one of the group) have been eagerly awaiting an American edition of his book, The Second World War. l939-1945 — a “Strategical and Tactical History” published in England two years ago. Their anticipation has been disappointed by the appearance (under the imprint of Duell, Sloan & Pearce; $5.00) of a volume so badly edited in detail as to cause constant and growing irritation to the reader, and so poorly conceived as a project that its virtues are concealed or submerged beneath a mass of unnecessary factual background.

Apparently the 1947 English edition was rushed to press in a great hurry, and copy and proof readers failed to find or correct an amazing number of errors and made ineffectual or listless efforts to clarify and straighten out the author’s text. In a rush job, slovenly work may be forgiven, but there is no excuse for perpetuating and embalming such errors in a later edition published in 1949. In this book, as heretofore, General Fuller demonstrates that he is doing his own thinking, on his own, irrespective of established or popular schools of thought, unhampered by convention, and quite unawed by hallowed names, high office, sacred cows, civilian or military. He has his short but pointed say about Mr. Churchill, President Roosevelt, Generals Montgomery, Eisenhower, and all the rest, He is not, I think, quite fair to General Eisenhower, whom he blames for a lack of political-strategic acumen which clearly should be attributed to his superiors in policy — the Combined Chiefs of Staff and the civilian controllers of such policy, President Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill. Otherwise this reviewer finds his praise and his criticism generally fair, just, or at least reasonable. General Fuller’s book is so frequently quotable that one is tempted to quote at length, rather than to paraphrase his confident and eloquent dicta. Perhaps a few lines from his preface may be repeated as containing the theses he sets out to prove. He says: “I have always held that war is no more than a lethal argument, and, to be worth the fighting, it demands a sane and profitable political end. That the object of war is not slaughter and devastation, but to persuade the enemy to change his mind. That ‘strategic bombing,” as inaugurated by Mr. Churchill, was not only morally wrong but militarily wrong and politically suicidal — one has only to look at Central Europe today to see this. The ideological wars are nonsense, not only because ideas are impervious to bullets, but, invariably, the holier the cause the more devilish the end. That bombardments of obliteration, as resorted to by so many generals, are as clumsy as they are generally unremunerative. That generalship demands audacity and imagination and not merely weight of metal and superiority of numbers. That British strategy should be based on sea power and not on land power, if only because Britain’s geographical position dictates that it should be so. For the United Kingdom to attempt to play the part of a Continental power is to play the fool, a thing she has been doing ever since 1914. And lastly, taking all in all and irrespective of what your enemy does, it is more profitable to fight like a gentleman than like a cad; for a cad’s war can only end in a cad’s peace, and a cad’s peace in yet another war, which to me seems to be silly.” In the present volume he does not go quite so far, but his horror and disgust for the moral decay which can endorse the use of mass bombing and rely on the atomic bomb for future offense and defense are just as strongly felt and expressed. However, he seems to beg the question at times. Naturally, as a soldier and a gentleman he would prefer a Sahib’s to a Cad’s war. But even an old-school war fought by professional soldiers, with the greatest and most scrupulous efforts to safeguard civilian populations, is “a lethal argument for a profitable political end” and as such a completely amoral thing. Total war is infinitely worse in its effects, more devastating, more cruel, by many degrees, but fundamentally it is no more wicked or immoral than cold-blooded professional warfare for a profitable political end. The difference is in degree, not in kind.

The blame for misspellings, compositor’s errors, meaningless blobs of vowels and consonants, and sentences which have to be read three times to be understood may fairly be laid to editorial incapacity. But for the ineffectiveness of the blueprint of the book the author is to blame. It was an error for General Fuller to attempt to cram into one volume a battle-bybattle account of the campaigns of so vast a conflict as World War II and at the same time to try to present his critiques and arguments in an adequate manner. So much factual material, condensed by the Procrustean bed of “Space,” becomes a mere chronicle of cities captured, positions occupied or lost, advances and retreats, which could be found in any yearbook of the period.

General Fuller must have written the chapters dealing with the various Russian campaigns with a kind of dreary doggedness. I doubt very much that he was really interested in writing the repetition of reported facts. His interest lies in the lessons to be learned from new tactics successfully essayed; in the validity of strategic decisions or in the reasons for their failure; in the political consequences of military policy; in the changing character of war as technology improves. To him Wingate’s campaign in Burma and the German airborne invasion of Crete are more important in their implications than the slugging match in Russia or the repetition anywhere of the tactics and strategy of World War I.

Space confined him, and important source material was not available at the time he wrote. Consequently his “history” could be neither wholly adequate nor convincing. The important element in his work is what he thought about a campaign, what lesson he could learn from it. — not the repeating of events with which he could assume his readers were reasonably familiar. And there is enough of such stimulating thought and comment to justify the book and enhance the reputation of the author.

It is proper to add, too, that if this book had been written in 1949, the author would have had access to better source material than, for example, Captain Harry Butcher’s notes, or Morehead’s, or Ingersoll’s forensic volumes. With the material available at the time the book was written, he seems to me to have reached an unusual number of sound conclusions.

I cannot quarrel, for example, with his condemnation of the imbecile slogan of “ Unconditional Surrender” adopted by Roosevelt and Churchill at Casablanca in 1943 —“two words [which] were to hang like a putrefying albatross around the necks of America and Britain.” This negation of policy not only prolonged the war with Germany and Japan for an indefinite period at a fabulous cost in blood and treasure, but it destroyed the hope of a balance of power in Europe and Asia and played directly into the hands of Russia. Perhaps no more fatal formula was ever produced by politicians alert for phrases which would catch the popular fancy.

Chiefly, however, he attacks the delusion — even now strenuously upheld by elements in our Air Forces — of the efficiency of mass bombing of enemy cities. The official reports have shown that the mass murder of civilian populations and the obliteration of cities did not accomplish either of the objectives confidently prophesied by the Drouhets and Mitchells — the collapse of civilian morale and the destruction of enemy productive capacity. Neither in Germany nor in Japan did the civilian population weaken under frightfulness, nor did production seriously decline. On the contrary. Germany’s production increased steadily and Japan’s ultimate weakness was due to blockade, submarine warfare, and a lack of food — rather than to the quarter of a million civilians blasted and burned to death, half a million maimed, and over two million homeless. Such indiscriminate destruction, he says, left us at the “peace” with cities of rubble to occupy, a population to feed, clothe, and house, and, of course, a heritage of hate for which the ruined cities will stand as monuments and reminders.

“Strategic bombing,” he says, should be aimed to cripple the movements of enemy armies by destroying the means of transportation; by depriving them of essential supplies and weapons, particularly oil, gas, munitions, food, and ordnance. This was successfully done before and after the invasion of Europe. But the vast expenditure and effort necessitated by the mass hit-or-miss bombing of civilian centers could have been employed far more profitably in the new and truer function of aviation for logistical purposes. At long last we learned that airborne troops and airborne supplies could immeasurably speed up ground attack. If instead of destroying enemy centers which we hoped to occupy, this air force could have been used to supply and support an invading army, largely dispensing with conventional bases and lines of communication, we could have occupied living cities much more quickly than was done by the slow approach to burned-out rubble heaps.

The danger is that we do not learn from past mistakes. There is a large and vocal element in our armed forces which still believes that wars can be won by mass bombing, and there is much popular support for the entirely false prediction that the atomic bomb is capable of winning a “good” peace. If the Western powers rely on this kind of flying Maginot line, they will deserve all that they get and they will probably get it.

Here we run into some of General Fuller’s less happy specialties: a simplification of the moral problems of modern warfare based on the political and ethical training of an old-school soldier, and a kind of embittered hindsight or wisdom after the event. Newspaper quotations from an article of his which appeared in a recent issue of Ordnance present his theory that it would have been better for the world if the United States had not intervened in World War I or II. Without such intervention there would have been in each instance a negotiated peace, the results of which would have been preferable to the present state of impoverishment and fear, the threat of truculent Stalinism, and the inevitability of World War III.

I agree with General Fuller that there is no more terrible indictment of our civilization than that Christian people should calmly discuss a future whose security is based on the indiscriminate slaughter by scientific methods of hostile populations — men, women, and children — and ruination of the cities, economies, and cultures which they have laboriously constructed through the ages. This moral callousness is a more dreadful thing than the death and destruction it relies on to save itself. Future historians may decide that Christendom died in World War II, but if that conflict is to be followed by another and more fearful one, we shall see, not Christendom dead, but Anti-Christ alive, dominating the souls of men.

“What,” asks General Fuller, “can all this striving to destroy lead to? To a veritable religion of death, in which the scientist becomes the immolating high priest, and humanity the sacrificial victim. This is not war; it is the conflict of gangsters,” Sure enough, a total war is worse than a Sahib’s war, but what General Fuller does not admit is that nil wars are bad. He admits this by implication, in his Ordnance article. Nobody can “win ” a modern war. Better to negotiate a peace which repudiates all the moral issues for which the war was fought than continue a suicidal struggle for “unconditional surrender.”

But he still clings to the theory that wars are inevitable and that it is well to fight them cleanly and reasonably, like well-regulated prizefights. He has not yet reached the point where his enemy is not the conduct of war, but war itself. Those dark and somber interludes in man’s struggle toward the light, those dreadful negations of his dream and glory, are for him, still, regrettable incidents in a. reasoned competitive political world — and let us all play up, play up, and play the game. The book has much valuable and constructive comment on ihe tactics and strategy of the last war and of the various great figures, military and civilian, in that stupendous drama. It is sharply critical of the present brutalized conception of warfare and it urges a return to relative sanity and decency.

If this reviewer discovers a certain confusion in General Fuller’s philosophy of war, it is perhaps because an equal confusion exists in the mind of this reviewer. In fact, I think we arc all confused. Only pacifists and Quakers are consistent in their hatred of war and their refusal to participate in it. But even they are recurrently faced by its existence, which they cannot ignore. The rest of us are hopelessly involved.

War, like Pope’s Vice, “is a monster of so frightful mien, As to be hated needs but to be seen; Yet seen too oft . . .” We have seen war too oft and its horror has become commonplace. We praise peace but we do not fight to destroy war. It is unfair to ask a professional soldier, writing a technical critique on certain aspects of the last war, to lead a crusade against war in the abstract. It is only because he criticizes some phases of war as abominable, without admitting that all war is abominable, that I feel that he steps from the field in which he is professionally competent into a philosophizing which is as confused and incoherent as my own. Let us praise him for the good and constructive element in his book and forgive the moral confusion which most of us share with him.