United We Stand

THIS study of American defense in all its aspects, of its present status and its future problems, is very nearly perfect of its kind. The author, one of the most distinguished and one of the most accurate of our military experts, achieves an admirable balance between the technical facts about our Army, Navy, and Air Force which he has at his fingers’ tips and those broad considerations of policy which should shape our defense plans.

As is usually the case with men who know their subject solidly and not superficially, he steers a steady course between extremes of optimism and pessimism. On Mr. Baldwin’s showing, America could not, if it chose, participate actively in the European war now or for some time to come, except with its Navy and, to a lesser extent, with its Air Force. The few divisions of the Army which would have been sufficiently well trained for active combat participation have been diluted with masses of new recruits and are less valuable, as military units, than they would have been a year ago.

But the author is convinced that physical invasion of the American continent is impossible, assuming, of course, that the American Navy remains intact. No one could be more averse to wishful thinking than is Mr. Baldwin; but his sober, realistic analysis of the situation lays many of the scare stories which military amateurs are most prone to spread.

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Lindbergh, he thinks, was obviously right in declaring that this country could not be invaded or seriously assaulted by air so long as no Eurasian air power possessed bases in this hemisphere. The future of air power cannot be foretold with certainty; but Mr. Baldwin believes that certain technical limiting factors— wing loading, gasoline capacity, power plant, size of air fields, and so forth — will slow down the rate of progress which has prevailed during the last three decades.

In discussing the defense program Mr. Baldwin fulfills the ideal which he sets for the American press. He is fair without being complacent and frank without being carping. As achievements he recognizes the inauguration of conscription, the acquisition of Atlantic bases from Newfoundland to British Guiana, the financial appropriations and technical preparations for a vast outflow of war material. He mentions as defects the lack of proper coördination (‘The effect of Washington, in so far as it concerns defense, is sometimes one of grandiose chaos’), an absence of ‘clarity of thought or unity of purpose,’ and the failure to acquire the base in Brazil which would be a keystone of hemisphere defense. Mr. Baldwin also fears that, in the training of our new army, quality has been sacrificed to mass, in defiance of the lessons of the European war.

The author possesses the gift of saying much in few words. The following sentence could scarcely be bettered as a thumbnail sketch: —

‘The Japanese Army, arrogant, narrow and conceited, has had some of the stuffing knocked out of it in China, but in the process it has displayed its most formidable quality, a tenacious absorption of punishment and a dogged, if sometimes dumb aggressiveness.’

Mr. Baldwin weighs the reasons for and against American entrance into the war and is a good deal less enthusiastic about this course than many people of less military experience. His viewpoint on this vital question is summarized in words which are well worth remembering: ‘Until there is virtual unanimity for war, a unanimity based on a more enduring structure than the emotionalism of the moment, we must not go to war. If a minority — vocal and vigorous and strident — leads the majority to a war it does not want, the minority and the nation will live to regret it.

W.H.C.