COME AS A CONQUEROR

As Mr. Davis cites Roosevelt as saying, we could not plan for the occupation of Germany until we had won the war. Then, to turn Clausewitz on his head, we had to continue the war by other means and initiate a program for both pacification and growth of the same German homeland we had just bombed into submission. The difficulties of organizing the army's plans for such a job and the task of civilizing barbaric Nazi Germany is the-story he seeks to tell; the point of view of the army is his particular perspective. There are problems. Our forces did not know why we were there, as conquerors, until the Russians began to move against our interests in Berlin. Mr. Davis does not know whether he is a historian or a chronicler. His fictionalized vignettes of what the occupation was like at the level of the foot soldier reveal his forte. When he is depicting the black marketeers in the ranks he is more at home than when he is trying to unravel the confused doings of the high command. The reader is left in the trenches with no real historical perspective of what is taking place outside the dug-out.