Word: maxims
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...elegant greystone Embassy on Washington's 16th Street, Russian Ambassador Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff (pronounced Lit-VEEN-off) heard the seconds tick. Watching the dogwood bloom on the lawn, he could picture the Russian spring: no Russian, however far from his homeland, can forget the feathery pastels of white birch and oak, the woods alive with the calls of the zhavornok and the drozd, the heady smell of mushrooms and flowers sprouting in soil musty-damp from the winter's snow...
This year the Russian spring is a threat, not a promise. The sun drying out the mud ever farther north unrolled a great firm highway for the Nazi war machine. Maxim Litvinoff could guess at the pattern of the Nazi drive: this time, probably, Hitler would smash south, toward the oil of the Caucasus, the Suez Canal, the Indian Ocean. At the same moment the Japanese, with perhaps 1,000,000 men in Manchukuo, their railroads fanned out to the Siberian border, might smash at Russia's Asian end. This was Russia's crucial hour...
...Circumstance. This shift in Washington opinion was not wrought by Maxim Litvinoff alone. Military logic backed...
What Would Be Fatal? The basic fact was still the same, terrible fact: that the Allies had too many fronts already. Soviet spokesmen (including Ambassador Maxim Litvinoff in Washington) no longer cried specifically for a second front in Europe; they insisted that the one supremely vital front was in Russia, that the one Allied task, above all, was to supply that front. MacArthur in Australia, the vital Mid-East, Chiang Kai-shek in China, General Wavell in India, Britain herself, U.S. forces stationed from Hawaii to Iceland-all these called as well for supply. Last week a London naval analyst...
...both cases he neglects with no more than a passing scoff the maxim that an attack cannot be made with a reasonable hope of success unless a number of calculable and near-calculable military factors weigh on the side of the attacker. He cites his favorite General, Foch, who sent a marvelous message to the bumbling "Papa" Joffre before the First Battle of the Marne stating that his center, his right, and his left were in terrible shape, that the situation was excellent, and that he was attacking. He forgets, it would appear, that the situation was excellent only because...