Word: commandeer
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Command Decision is focused on the less happy, indeed the downright harrowing, aspects of authority. As Brigadier General K. C. Dennis of the Air Forces (ably played by Paul Kelly) sees it, unless the jet-plane factories deep inside the Reich are swiftly destroyed, jets will soon cover the sky and immeasurably prolong the war. So, day after day, he orders the bombing of those factories, though his losses are appalling and the thought of the losses tears him apart...
...target for civilian public opinion, a perfect scapegoat for the Pentagon's brass hats, easy prey for congressional busybodies making overseas inspection tours. No pleas, no threats will budge Dennis: he is as adamantine of mind as he is agonized of soul. Eventually he is relieved of his command. But at the very end, his successor is won over to his policy...
...Command Decision is hard-hitting theater, full of mailed conflict and scrappy talk. What it hits hardest, however, is all sentimental attitudes toward war, all evasions of how damnable it can be, all attempts to break it up neatly into so many parts hell and so many parts humanitarianism. But there is nothing doctrinaire or diagrammatic about the play. Playwright Haines (himself an Air Forces veteran) writes something that could easily have happened; and his characters are people, not mere points of view...
First A-Bomb Plants. The tense problem of the atomic bomb is naturally bothering the Soviet high command. Russia has the knowledge-but she has not yet brought manufacture of the bomb to an industrial level. Already, however, the Soviet Union has begun to build the first three plants for the production of A-bombs. They are in eastern Siberia and will be ready to begin turning out bombs in some 12 to 18 months...
...Soviet high command realizes that the longer war can be averted, the better their chances of winning. The Kremlin is therefore doing its best-within relative limits-to stave off war. Nevertheless . . . the Russian leaders have already established their plan for war.... One primary conviction dominates all the planning of the Red Army General Staff: that the decisive theater of military operations will eventually be the Far East...