World Battlefronts, STRATEGY: War by Coalition

A Russian-born exile, economist and war analyst named Max Werner made a stir last week by proposing that Allies be allies. The fact that this elemental common sense was enough to command attention, and even to loom as a fresh approach to the war, was more frightening than anything Mr. Werner actually wrote in The Great Offensive (Viking; $3).

Author Werner’s proposition is that the U.S., Britain and Soviet Russia are the chief members of a natural, global coalition, that all they have to do to defeat the coalition of Germany and Japan is to plan and wage the war on a coalition basis. According to Max Werner, the U.S. and Britain were very late in recognizing this A-B-C of victory, are much later in doing anything about it. He believed that the Allies were still far from real coalition when The Great Offensive went to press last month.

The Second Front, in Author Werner’s opinion, was delayed more by the failure to achieve coalition than by “technical difficulties.” He believes that there is still time for a second front—this year if coalition proceeds as speedily as it should, early in 1943 at the latest. Even then, he says, Allied action in Western Europe (and possibly in Southern Europe at the same time) would trap Hitler between two or more fronts, enable the Red Army to take the offensive on a decisive scale.

The Great Offensive depicts these prospects in a dogmatic fashion which makes the case sometimes seem too simple to be true. But Author Werner, on his record, has a good claim to attention. In his previous war books (Battle for the World; Military Strength of the Powers) he hammered on one great point: that Soviet Russia had an army and a strategy which in the end could cope with Germany. He looked bad when the Nazis were slugging through western Russia last year; he looked better after the battles of Smolensk and Moscow; and last week, when the Germans changed their tactics on the Volga (see p. 23), he looked good again.

The Russian Front. According to Author Werner, the Red Army borrowed its plan of defensive war from a long line of German strategists, including “the greatest military theoretician of our time,” Hitler’s own Field Marshal William Ritter von Leeb. Werner quotes Leeb: “More than ever before, the defense, because of its increased power, is in a position to serve its original purpose. This is to break the strength of the attacker, to parry his blows, to weaken him and to bleed him white. The resultant reversal of strength will enable the defender himself to find the strength to move to the attack.”

Max Werner says that the Germans committed military suicide when they attempted a strategy of encirclement and total destruction in Russia. German production and offensive power passed its peak last year; now “the German army is in no position to find the resources for smashing the modern Russian system of total defense on the entire front. Tactically, the variety and skill of the Russian defense render ultimate German victory impossible.”

In The Great Offensive, the second front is therefore not urged to save Russia. It is urged to bring the full, coalition power of the U.S., Britain and Russia against the German Army.

The Pacific War, in Max Werner’s opinion, must be a holding campaign until Germany is defeated. Meantime, The Great Offensive gives a helpful explanation to readers who have pondered the U.S. Navy’s tables of comparative U.S. and Japanese naval losses and wondered how Japan could keep on fighting. Max Werner takes the simple view that “pure sea power—ship v. ship—no longer means much.” To the Japanese, the Pacific Ocean was merely a highway; warships were mainly vehicles for transporting the men & weapons of land-air power to the places of conquest. Thus, it will take U.S. land & air power, supported by incidental sea power, to recover what the Japanese seized.