THE MILITARY IN THE HERALD TRIBUNE BOOK REVIEW

Readers showed sharply declining interest in books on the war and military, with a few major exceptions, in 1946. They had been a top selling category during the war. The Sunday Herald Tribune reviewed two of them this week.

THE CASE AGAINST THE ADMIRAL: WHY WE MUST HAVE A UNIFIED COMMAND by William Bradford Huie was reviewed by retired naval officer P. J. Searles. The issue of uniting the Navy and the Army under a single command was being hotly debated in Washington and in the press at this time with the Navy offering great resistance to the idea. Each had their own cabinet level office.

“William Bradford Huie is on a rampage," Searles wrote. "With stinging verbal whips he lashes out at Army and Navy practices and faults which have angered him.” The book, Searles decided, was “certain to stir up indignant controversy in high military circles.” However the reviewer felt that some of Huie’s targets were dead horses, including his indictment of the failure in earlier decades for either branch of the Armed Forces to recognize the importance of air power. More to the point and livelier was his account of the jealousy and lack of cooperation during the war between General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz, which led to a “startling” list of duplications including separate but adjoining air bases and side-by-side hospitals.

Huie also argued against the class system in the Armed Forces, a situation that Searles noted had aroused such widespread indignation among enlisted men that Congress and an Army board were investigating. Searles predicted some lessening of the formal social distinctions between the ranks but not the leveling demanded by some. In his last chapter, Huie turned prophet, predicting that the next world war would be between the US and Asia and would be carried out through atom bomb-carrying rockets. The book is in print.

BASTOGNE: THE FIRST EIGHT DAYS was a very different kind of book about the war. In it, Colonel S.L.A Marshall, assisted by Captain John G. Westover and Lieutenant A. Joseph Webber, presented a detailed account of the defense of Bastogne, the beleaguered Ardennes town. The fight already had entered military legend. Marshall was the official Army historian for the European Theater and later the Korean War. His methods and his accuracy were both subjects of controversy. He conducted interviews with many people who had participated in the events rather than relying on official accounts from top officers. Reviewer Spencer Klaw noted that this was a technical book that required some knowledge of military terminology. And it did not answer the questions of what, if anything, made this town so strategically important to the Allied effort or whether this well-documented incident differed greatly from the experiences of other bands of men who had been engaged in other, less well-known, battles. In all, Klaw found it to be “excellent source material for historians but it is rough going for the general reader.” The book is in print.