How War Came

The red flannel nightgown in which Mr. Hull envisaged us Americans — too short in front when we pulled it down behind, too short behind when we pulled it down in front — and the similarly undignified birth certificate the authors fill out for “the United Nations” are characteristic bright spots that make the required reading of this book an easy chore. The abbreviated garment was the one-ocean United States navy. The birth certificate shows that “United Nations” was a pre-breakfast inspiration of Mr. Roosevelt’s, quite literally christened with Mr. Churchill’s O.K. from an Englishman’s morning tub.

The period from the “ second Sedan” to Pearl Harbor taught Americans stupendous lessons. In this book two seasoned journalists — Mr. Lindley, a biographer of the President, and Mr. Davis, author of that recent fine study, The Atlantic System — have made immediate use of these lessons. The authors offer a graphic outline of the global strategy necessary for national survival, a revealing glimpse of the new geography of the air age, and an easy introduction to the geographic and ideological pivots which have fixed the position of United States in the world for many generations past and to come.

Not without faults, the book confesses the source of most of them in its subtitle, “ An American White Paper; from the fall of France to Pearl Harbor.” A “white paper,”of course, is usually a pro-government document issued by an official agency, not a product of more or less independent authorship. But the subtitle is not entirely out of place. The authors’ efforts seem directed chiefly to explaining the Administration’s foreign policies in such a way as to disarm criticism. One may agree absolutely with the trend of those policies. One need not agree so completely in detail.

There is much for the student in this book, much for the merely curious reader. Some personalized flashes are pertinent to the development of otherwise mystifying phases of policy; others just provide stage business. The opening, which cinematographs inside-Washington on December 7, reads like a thriller; the authors can well expect to be approached for movie rights to the first chapter.