Strategy for the Citizen
There is a tendency at this moment to consider Hitler a master
strategist, master psychologist, master statesman. His analysis of
democracy, however, leaves something unsaid, and the nervous strong
men who admire Hitler, as well as the weaklings who need "leadership",
are doing their best to fill in the gaps. The Hitlerian concept of
totality allows no room for difference; an official bread ration and
an official biochemistry are equally to be accepted by everyone; in
democracy Hitler finds a deplorable tendency to shrink from rationing
and to encourage deviations from the established principles of
biochemistry. This, he says, weakens the State; for one thing it leads
to endless discussion. (Hitler is an orator, not a debater; dislike of
letting other people talk is natural; his passion for action on a
world-scale, immense in space, enduring for all time, has the same
terrific concentration on himself.) Hitler's admirers in a democracy
take this up with considerable pleasure; in each of his victories they
see an argument against the Bill of Rights. Then war comes; sugar is
wanting and we accept a ration card; supreme commands are established
in various fields; and the sentiment spreads that "we can only beat
Hitler by becoming a 'total' State". (No one dares say "Nazi".)
Hitler, discerning in us a toleration of dissent, has driven hard into
every crevice, trying to split us apart, like cannel coal. He has
tried to turn dissent into disunion--and he has been helped by some of
the most loyal and patriotic Americans almost as much as he has been
helped by bundists.
We have not known how to deal with dissent; we stopped looking for the
causes of disagreement; even when war came, we confused the areas of
human action in which difference is vital with the areas in which
difference is a mortal danger.
The moment we saw the direction of Hitler's drive, which was to
magnify our differences, we began to encourage him by actively
intensifying all our disagreements; the greater our danger, the more
we were at odds. The results were serious enough.
No policy governing production had been accepted by industry;
No policy governing labor relations had been put into practise so that
it was operating smoothly;
No great stock of vital raw materials was laid up;
No great stock of vital war machinery had been created;
No keen awareness of the significance of the war had become an
integrated part of American thought;
No awareness of all the possibilities of attack had become an
integrated part of military and naval thought.
To this pitch of unreadiness the technique of "divide and disturb" had
brought us--but it had, none the less, failed. For the purpose of
disruption in America was to paralyze our will, to prevent us from
entering the war, to create a dangerous internal front if we did enter
the war.
What we proved was this: dissent is not a symptom of weakness, it is a
source of strength. It is the counterpart of the great scientific
methods of exploration, comparison, proof. Our dissents mean that we
continue to search; they mean that we do not rule out improvement
after we have accepted a machine or a method. (We carried this
"dissent" to an extreme in "yearly models" of motor cars and almost
daily models of lipstick; but we did manufacture in quantity, and the
error of _change before production_ which stalled our aircraft program
of 1917 was not repeated.)
_Why We Can't Use Hitler_
If we "need a Hitler" to defeat Hitler, we are lost, at this moment,
irretrievably, because the _final_ triumph of Hitlerism is to make us
need Hitler. The truth is we cannot use a Hitler, we cannot use
fascism, we cannot use any form of "total" organization except in the
one field where totality has always existed, which is war. So far as
war touches the composition of women's stockings or children's
ice-cream sodas, we need unified organization in the domestic field;
but not "total government". We have to be told (since it is not a
matter of individual taste) how many flavors of ice-cream may be
manufactured; but the regimentation of people is not required. (The
United States Army has officially declared against complete
regimentation in one of its own fields; every soldier studies the
history of this war and is encouraged to ask questions about it,
because "the War Department considers that every American soldier
should know clearly why and for what we are fighting.")
We cannot use a Hitler because we lack the time. We cannot catch up
with Hitler on Hitlerism. We cannot wait ten years to re-condition the
people of America, the ten vital years which Hitler spent enslaving
the German mind were spent by us in digging the American people out
from the ruined economic system which collapsed on them in 1929. We
are conditioned by the angry and excited controversy over the New
Deal; we are opinionated, variant, prejudiced, individual,
argumentative. We cannot be changed over to the German model. Perhaps
in a quieter moment we could be captivated (if not captured) by an
American-type dictator, a Huey Long; in wartime, when people undergo
incalculable changes of habit without a murmur, the old framework and
the established forms of life must be scrupulously revered. Otherwise
people will be scared; they will not respond to encouragement. That is
why we cannot take time to learn how to love a dictator.
The alternative is obvious: to re-discover the virtue which Hitler
calls a vice, to defeat totality by variety (which is the essential
substance of unity). I do not mean five admirals disputing command of
one fleet or one assembly line ordered to make three wholly different
aeroplane engines. I mean the combination of elements, as they are
combined in the food we eat and the water we drink; and as they are
combined in the people we are.
We have lived by combining a variety of elements; we have always
allowed as much freedom to variety as we could, believing that out of
this freedom would come a steady progress, a definite betterment of
our State; so, we have been taught, the human race has progressed, not
by utter uniformity, and not by anarchy, but by an alternation of two
things--the standard and the variant.
Now we face death--called totality. For us it is death; and we can not
avoid it by taking it in homeopathic doses, we can only live by
destroying whatever is deadly to us.
It is hard for a layman to translate the "strategy of variety" into
terms of production or naval movement. The translation is being made
every day by men in the factories and in the field; instinctively they
follow the technique of variety because it is natural to them. All the
layman can do is to watch and make sure that out of panic we do not
betray ourselves to the enemy.
It is not a matter of military technique, but of common sense that we
can only destroy our enemy out of our strength, striking at his
weakness; we can never defeat him by striking with our weakest arm
against his strongest. And our strong point is the variety, the
freedom, the independence of our thought and action. Hitler calls all
this a weakness, because he has destroyed it in his own country; and
so gives us the clue to his own weak spot.
_Has Hitler a Weakness?_
In the face of the stupendous victories of Germany, it is hard to say
that Hitler's army has a weak spot; but it did not take London or
Moscow in its first attempts, nor Suez. Somewhere in this formidable
strength a weakness is to be discovered; it will not be discovered by
us if we are intimidated into imitation. We have to be flexible,
feeling out our adversary, falling back when we have to, lunging
forward in another place or on another level; for this war is being
fought on several planes at once, and if we are not strong enough
today on one, we can fight on another; we are, in fact, fighting
steadily on the production front, intermittently on the V (or
foreign-propaganda) front, on the front of domestic stability, on the
financial front (in connection with the United Nations); and the war
front itself is divided into military and naval (with air in each) and
transport; our opportunity is to win by creating our own most
effective front, and keep hammering on it while we get ready to fight
on the ones our enemies have chosen.
Every soldier feels the difference between his own army and any other;
every general or statesman knows that the kind of war a nation fights
rises out of the kind of nation it is. This is the form of strategy
which the layman has to understand--in self-defense against the
petrified mind which either will not change the methods of the last
war, or will scrap everything in order to imitate the enemy. The
layman knows something of warfare now, because the layman is in it. He
knows that the tank and the Stuka and the parachute troop were
separate alien inventions combined by the German High Command; but
combinations of various arms is not an exclusively German conception.
The new concept in this war is ten years old, it is the sacrifice of a
nation to its army, the creation of mass-munitions, the concentration
on offensive striking power. All of these are successful against
broken and betrayed armies in France, against small armies unsupported
by tanks and planes; they are not entirely successful against huge
armies, fighting under trusted leaders, for a civilization they love,
an army of individual heroes, supported by guerillas on one side, and
an incalculable production power on the other. Possibly the Soviet
Union has discovered one weakness in the German war-strategy; it may
not be the weakness through which we can strike; we may have to find
another. We have to find the weakness of Japan, too--and we are not so
inclined to imitate them.
There is a famous picture of Winston Churchill, hatless in the street,
with a napkin in his hand, looking up at the sky; it was in Antwerp in
1914 and Churchill had left his dinner to see enemy aircraft in the
sky--an omen of things to come. At Antwerp Churchill had tried to head
off the German swing to the sea, but Antwerp was a defeat and
Churchill returned to London, still looking for some way to refuse the
German system of the trench, the bombardment, and the breakthrough. He
tried it with the tank; he tried it at Gallipoli; finally the Allies
tried it, half-heartedly, at Salonika. The war, on Germany's terms,
was a stalemate and Germany might have broken through; the war ended
because the balance was dislocated when America came in and,
simultaneously, both England and America began to fight the war also
on the propaganda level. By that time Churchill was "discredited"; he
had tried to shorten the war by two years and the British forces, with
success in their hands, had failed to strike home, failed to send the
one more battleship, the one more division which would have insured
victory--because Kitchener and the War Office and the French High
Command wanted to keep on fighting the war in the German way.
_Escape from Despair_
The desperation which overcomes the inexpert civilian at the thought
of fighting the military machines of Germany and Japan is justified
_only_ if we propose to fight them on their terms, in the way they
propose to us. Analogies are dangerous, but there is a sense in which
war is a chess game (as chess is a war game). White opens with Queen's
pawn to Qu 3, and Black recognizes the gambit. He can accept or
decline. If he accepts, it is because he thinks he can fight well on
that basis, but Black can also reject White's plan of campaign. The
good player is one who can break out of the strategy which the other
tries to impose.
We have felt ourselves incapable of fighting Hitler because we hate
Hitlerism and we do not want to think as he does, feel as he does, act
as he does--with more horror, more cruelty, more debasement of
humanity, in order to defeat him. And the public statements of our
leaders have necessarily concealed any new plan of attack; in fact we
have heard chiefly of super-fascist production, implying our
acceptance of the fascist tactics in the field; the best we can expect
is that soon we, not they, will take the offensive. If this were all,
it would still leave us fighting the fascist war.
The civilian's totally untrained dislike of this prospect is of
considerable importance because it is a parallel to the citizen's
authoritative and decisive objection to the Hitlerian strategy of
propaganda; and if the civilian holds out, if he discovers our native
natural strategy of civil action in the war, the army will be
constantly recruiting anti-fascists, will live in an atmosphere of
inventive anti-fascism, and therefore will never completely fall under
the spell of the enemy's tactics. That is why it is important for the
citizen to know that he is right. _We do not have to fight Hitler in
his way_; that is what Hitler wants us to do, because _if we do we can
not win_. There is another way--although we may not have found it yet.
In its celebrated "orientation course" the United States army explains
the strategy of the war to every one of its soldiers, not to make them
strategists, but to make them better soldiers. The civilian needs at
least as much knowledge so that he is not over-elated by a stroke of
luck or too cast down by disaster. The jokes about amateur strategists
and the High Command's justifiable resentment of ignorant criticism
are both beside the point; civilians do not need text books on
tactics; they need to know the nature of warfare. They needed
desperately to know in February, 1942, why General MacArthur was
performing a useful function in Bataan and why bombers were not sent
to his aid; and this information came to them from the President. But
the President is not the only one who can tell civilians how long it
takes to transport a division and put it into action; how air and sea
power interact; what a beach action involves; and a few other facts
which would allay impatience and give the worker in the factory some
sense of the importance of his work. The civilian in war work or out
of it should know something about war, and in particular he should
know that there are several kinds of war, one of which is correct and
appropriate and effective for us.
_Military Mummery_
It might be a good thing if some of the mumbo-jumbo about military
strategy were reduced to simple terms, so that the civilians, whose
lives and fortunes and sacred honor are involved, would know what is
happening to them. The military mind, aided by the military expert,
loves to use special terms; until recently the commentator on strategy
was as obscure and difficult as a music critic, and despatches from
the field as obscure as prescriptions in Latin. It is supposed that
doctors wrote in Latin not only because it was an exact and universal
language, but because it was not understood by laymen, so it gave
mystery and authority to their prescriptions. Latin is still not
understood, but the simple art of advertising has destroyed a vast
amount of business for the doctors because ads in English persuaded
the ignorant to use quack remedies and patent and proprietary
medicines, without consulting the doctor.
A rebellion like this against the military mind may occur; experts are
now writing for the popular press, and talking in elementary terms to
millions by radio. They cannot teach the techniques of correlated tank
and air attack any more than music critics can teach the creation of
head tones. But they can expound the fundamentals--and so expose the
military leadership to the _criticism it desperately needs_ if it is
to function properly. The essentials of warfare are dreadfully
simple--the production manager of any great industrial concern deals
with most of them every day. You have to get materials and equipment;
train men to use certain tools and instruments; bring power to bear at
chosen points, in sufficient quantity, at the right time, for the
right length of time; you have to combine the various kinds of force
at your disposal, and arrange a schedule, as there is a schedule for
chassis and body work in a motor car factory, so that the right
chassis is in the right place as its body is lowered upon it; you have
to stop or go on, according to judgments based on information. The
terrifying decisions, the choice of place and time, the selection of
instruments, the allocation of power to several points, are made by
the high command on the grand scale or by a sergeant if his officer is
shot down; and the right judgments distinguish the great commander or
the good platoon leader from the second rate. The civilian, without
information, cannot decide what to do; but, as Britain's _civilian_
courts of inquiry have shown, he can tell whether the right decisions
have been made. He can tell as well as the greatest commander, that
indecision and dispersion of forces made success at the Dardanelles
impossible in 1916; or that lack of a unified plan of tank attack made
the wreck of France certain in 1940. The civilian American who has
taken a hundred detours on motor roads can understand even the purely
military elements of a flanking movement; the industrial American need
not be baffled by the problems of fire-power, coordination, or supply.
We can understand the war if the mystery is stripped away, and if we
are allowed to understand that the wrong strategy is as fatal to us as
the wrong prescription.
I believe that we will have to strip the false front from
international diplomacy, from warfare, from all the inherited
"mysteries" which are still pre-Revolutionary in essence. We will have
to bring these things up to date because our lives depend on them, we
can no longer depend on the strategy of Gustavus Adolphus or the
diplomacy of Metternich. Five million soldiers in khaki, with a
nation's life disrupted for their support, require a different
strategy from that of Burgoyne's hired Hessians; and a hundred and
thirty million individuals simply do not want the intrigue and
Congress-dances diplomacy which traded territory, set up kings, and
found pretexts for good wars.
We have destroyed a good deal of the mummery of economics--not without
help; politics has become more familiar to us, we now know that a
thief in office is a thief, that tariffs are not made by abstract
thinkers, but by manufacturers and farmers and factory workers; we
know, with some poignancy, that taxes are paid by people like
ourselves and we are beginning to know that taxes are spent to keep
people alive and healthy and in jobs and, to a minute extent, also to
keep people cheerful, their minds alert, their spirits buoyant. The
very fact that we are now _all_ critics of spending is a great
advance, because it means we are all paying; when we are all critics
of foreign policy it will mean that we are all signing contracts with
other nations; and when we are all critics of war, it will mean that
we are all fighting.
As a student, I know what a layman can know about strategy; less about
tactics; as a citizen I should be of greater service to my country if
I knew more. What I have learned, from many sources, seems to hold
together and to demonstrate one thing: behind strategy in the field is
a strategy of a people in action; and victory comes to the leaders who
organize and use the national forces in keeping with the national
character.
I have gone to several authorities to discover whether the "tactics of
variety" (a "natural" in propaganda) has any counterpart in the field.
I cannot pretend that it is an accepted idea; it is hardly more than a
name for an attitude of mind; but I did find authority for the feeling
that an American (or United Nations) strategy need not be--and must
not be--the strategy of Hitler. So much the civilian can take to his
bosom, for comfort.
_A Variety of Strategies_
The greatest comfort to myself was in a little book published just in
time to corroborate a few guesses and immensely to widen my outlook;
it is called _Grand Strategy_; the authors are H.A. Sargeaunt, a
specialist in poison gas and tank design, a scientist and historian;
and Geoffrey West, biographer and student of politics; both British.
Although there are some difficult pages and some odd conclusions, this
book is a revelation--particularly it shows the connection between war
and the social conditions of nations making war; in the authors' own
words, "war and society condition each other"; they connect war with
progress and show how each nation can develop a strategy out of its
own resources. The hint we all got at school, that the French
revolution is responsible for vast civilian armies, is carried into a
history of the nineteenth century--and into this war.
The authors have their own names for each kind of war--each is a
"solution" to the problem of victory. Each adds a special factor to
the body of strategy known at the time, and this added special factor
rises from the country which uses it--from its methods of production,
its education, its religion, its banking and commercial habits, and
its whole social organization. Napoleon's solution was based on the
revolutionary enthusiasm of the French people; he added zeal, the
intense application of force, speed of movement, repeated hammering,
throwing in reserves. All of these things demand devotion, patriotic
self-sacrifice, and these qualities had been created, for the French,
by the Republic; they were not qualities known to the mercenaries and
small standing armies of Napoleon's enemies.
Against Napoleon's total use of the strategy of force, the British
opposed a strength based on the way they lived; it was a sea-strength
of blockade, but also on land they refused to accept the challenge of
Napoleon. They would not come out (until they were ready at Waterloo)
and let Napoleon find their weak spot for the exercise of his force.
Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, but the turning point came
years earlier at Torres Vedras in Spain; as Napoleon increased force,
Wellington increased "persistence"; it is called the "strategy of
attrition" and it means that Wellington's "aim was to wear down the
enemy troops by inducing them to attack [where Wellington] could
withdraw to take up positions and fight again."
Today, getting news of a campaign like Wellington's in Spain, the
average man would repeatedly read and hear headlines of retreat; he
would get the impression of an uninterrupted series of defeats. But
the Peninsular War was actually a triumph for British arms. It was a
triumph because Wellington refused to fight in any way not natural to
the British; his masterly retreats did not disturb the "inborn
toughness and phlegm, that saving lack of imagination" which makes the
British, as these British authors say, "good at retreats". Moreover,
this war of slow retreats gave Britain time to develop a tremendous
manufacturing power, to organize the blockade of Napoleon and the
merchant fleet for supply to Spain. The whole history of modern
England, its acceptance of the factory system, its naval supremacy,
its relation to the Continent, and its internal reforms--all rise from
the kind of war Wellington made, and the kind he refused to make.
For the curious, the later "solutions" are: under Bismark and Moltke,
increased training and use of equipment and material resources; under
Hitler, "synchronized timing" (connected with air-power and the
impossibility of large-scale surprise; also connected with "alertness
and intelligence" in the individual soldier, a frightening development
under a totalitarian military dictatorship); and finally, under
Churchill, "the national sandbag defense", increasing "usable morale
and initiative". Sandbag defense gets its name from the battle of
London; but it refers to all sorts of defensive operations--a bullet
is shot into sand and the dislodged grains of sand form themselves
again so that the next bullet has the same depth of sand to go
through--unless the bullets come so fast in "synchronized timing" or
blitzkrieg that the sand hasn't time to close over the gap again. The
defense "demands that every person in the nation be capable of
sticking to his task even without detailed orders from others,
regardless of the odds against him and though it may mean certain
death. _Every_ person--not merely the trained minority. This happened
at Dunkirk...." At Dunkirk the grains of sand were hundreds of small
yachts, motor boats, trawlers, coasting vessels, many of which were
taken to the dreadful beach by civilians virtually without orders;
some of them became ferry-boats, taking men off the shore to the
transports which could not get close enough, going back and forth,
without stop--the grains of sand reforming until an army was rescued.
These examples drive home the principle that a form or style of
warfare must be found by each nation corresponding to the state of the
nation _at that time_; the "psychology" of the nation may remain
constant for a century, but the way to make war will change if the
methods of production have changed. If the nation has lost (or won)
colonies, if education has reached the poor, if child labor has ended
(so that youths of eighteen are strong enough for tank duty), if women
are without civil rights, if a wave of irreligion or political
illiberality has swept over the country--if any vital change has
occurred, the style of war must change also. Every social change
affects the kind of war we can fight, the kind we must discover for
ourselves if we are to defeat an enemy who has chosen his style and is
trying to impose it on us. The analysis of Hitler's war-style must be
left to experts; if its essence is "synchronized timing", our duty is
to find a way of upsetting the time-table, not only by months, but by
minutes. Possibly the style developed by Stalin can do both--by
pulling back into the vast spaces of Russia, Stalin created a
battlefield without shape or definition, which may have prevented the
correlation of the parts of Hitler's armies; by encouraging guerillas,
he may have upset the timing of individual soldiers, tanks, and
planes. The success of the Eighth Route Army in China was based on a
totally different military style, the only completely Communist style
on record; for the army was successful because it built a Communist
society on the march, actually and literally, establishing schools,
manufacturing arms, bearing children, and fighting battles at the same
time, so that at the end of several years the army had extricated
itself from a trap, crossed and recrossed miles of enemy territory,
reformed itself with more men and arms than it had at the
beginning--and had operated as a center of living civilization for
hundreds of thousands.
The operations of Chiang Kai Chek against the Japanese are another
example of rejecting the enemy's style; over the enormous terrain of
China, the defending armies could scatter and hide from aircraft; the
cities fell or were gutted by fire; but the people moved around them,
the armies remained. Japan's attack on Britain and ourselves began
with islands, where the lesson of China could not be applied; and the
islands were dependencies, not free nations like China, so the
psychology of defense was also different; in the opening phases there
was no choice and the Japanese forced us to accept their way of making
war. Their way, it appears, is appropriate to their beliefs, their
requirements in food, their capacity to imitate Europe, and dozens of
other factors, not precisely similar to ours. Their experience and
outlook in life and ideas of honor may lead to the suicide bomber;
ours do not. Our dive bombers feel no shame if they miss a target;
they have a duty which is to save their ships and return for another
try; it is against the whole natural tradition of the west that a man
should kill himself for the honor of a ruler; we would not send out an
army with orders to gain honor by death, as we prefer to gain honor by
victory. So in the true sense it would be suicidal for us to imitate
the Japanese; our heroism-to-the-death is the arrival, at the final
moment, of a last reserve of courage and devotion; it is not a planned
bravery, nor a communal devotion, it is as private as liberty--or
death.
Our heroism rises out of our lives. Our science of victory will have
to be based on our lives, too, on the way we manufacture, play games,
read newspapers, eat and drink and bring up children. It is the
function of our high command to translate what we can do best into a
practical military strategy. The civilian's function is to provide the
physical and moral strength needed to support the forces in the field.
Here the civilian is qualified to make certain demands, because we
know where our intellectual and moral strength lies; we can work to
keep the tactics of variety operative in the field of public emotion.
The next two chapters are a translation of the tactics of variety into
terms of propaganda and its objective, which is unity of action.