January 2011

I resent the gratuitous canard contained in John Lukacs’s “The Dangerous Summer of 1940” (October/November 1986). Lukacs charges that our current American government “neither remembers nor understands” the historical quid pro quo that offered the Soviet Union hegemony in Eastern Europe as reward for its tremendous exertions against Nazi Germany during the war.

I’m quite sure that the Reagan administration fully comprehends the oftrepeated argument that Russia feels entitled to its half of Europe both as war booty and as buffer against attack. But unlike some liberal historians and commentators, Mr. Reagan does not accept this arrangement as either inevitable or permanent (much less moral).

John Lukacs replies: What is this man writing about? In my article, I deplored, and regretted, the condition that the Western democracies would not have been able—indeed, they were not able—to conquer the Third Reich by themselves. That is very different from the advocacy of a quid pro quo. In World War II Britain and the United States fought Germany, Italy, and Japan rather than “totalitarianism.” If the raison d’etre of the United States is to war against totalitarianism, we should hasten to declare war not only against the Soviet Union but against Bulgaria, Zimbabwe, Iran, Nicaragua, Angola, Libya, Uganda, Albania, China (President Nixon’s favorite), etc., etc. My typewriter is running out of ribbon.

No novelist would dare concoct the series of remarkable coincidences that helped England survive the military might of Germany in “The Dangerous Summer of 1940.” History is often stranger than fiction.

Having served on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific Theater in World War II, I found Captain Beach’s article on naval air power (October/November 1986) of much interest. In his discussion of the Navy’s dirigible experience, I’m sure it was space limitations that prevented him from including the fact that the Macon was actually a flying aircraft carrier. It had the capability of launching, recovering, and hangaring observation planes while in the air and was engaged in this work shortly before its loss in 1935.

The following items in “101 Things Every College Graduate Should Know About American History” (December 1986) should read as follows:

Item 8: Had enough? The question was asked by the Republicans during the 1946 congressional elections. After fourteen years of “Democratic rule,” the Republicans maintained, it was “time for a change.”

Item 14: Marbury v. Madison (1803). William Marbury sued Secretary of State James Madison in order to obtain a commission appointing him a justice of the peace that had been signed but not de livered by retiring President John Adams. Important because in deciding the case, the Court for the first time declared a law of Congress unconstitutional.

In Elting E. Morison’s article on baseball (August/September 1986), he goes to considerable trouble and much beating about the facts and statistics but only just barely touches on the most important point about the reason for baseball’s popularity: the game perfectly suits the needs of the American people. That is, it demands a small measure of cooperation among the players, but at the same time, more than any other game, it is likely to make a hero out of almost any player for at least a moment. Americans want heroes, but they want their heroes to be more or less ordinary people. Also, it offers the possibility of the outcome being completely reversed through the action of a grand slam, so the outcome is less often obvious before the end than in any other game.

by Q. David Bowers; The Vestal Press; 212 pages; hardcover, $24.951 paperback, $14.95.

by Ernest Lawrence Thayer; Library of Congress; 4 pages and record, $5.95 plus $2.00 postage and handling from the Information Office, Box A, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. 20540.

by Ivan Musicant; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 349 pages; $19.95.

She was laid down under the restrictions of the naval treaties of the 1920s and launched before the far more powerful Iowa class came along to revolutionize battleship design. But as the author points out in this spirited account, “none of the Iowas ever blasted it out eye to eye with a Japanese battleship at eight thousand yards and sent it to the bottom.” That is what the Washington did in the desperate night action known as the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal late in 1942, but before and after this extraordinary highlight of her career, she steamed through an enormous amount of naval history, running the ghastly North Atlantic convoy routes to Russia and serving through most of the fighting in the Pacific.

by Alice G. Marquis; The Free Press; 261 pages; $22.50.

by Nicholas N. Kittrie and Eldon D. Wedlock, Jr.; The Johns Hopkins University Press; 714 pages; $39.50.