Word: stimson
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...desperate winter of 1942-43, when Nazi wolf packs were sinking as much as 700,000 tons of shipping a month, the U.S. Navy and the Army Air Forces were locked in their own flaming battle. Poking up the dying embers this week, ex-Secretary of War Henry Stimson devoted the second installment of his memoirs in the Ladies' Home Journal to his own frankly partisan version of this feud...
...Churchill's case, it was a question of caution. On three separate occasions he tried to sidetrack BOLERO for a less risky venture. The last time, Stimson wrote angrily in his diary: "As the British won't go through with what they agreed to, we will turn our backs on them and take up the war with Japan." In Roosevelt's case, it was a question of "some operation in 1942" and a "lingering predilection for the Mediterranean." The resulting compromise was the invasion of North Africa, a bitter disappointment to Stimson, but "the only operation that...
Single Yardstick. Despite his dissatisfaction with the North African invasion, Stimson supported it once it was launched. When Wendell Willkie was preparing to go on the air to attack the Eisenhower-Darlan agreement, Stimson grabbed for his telephone. "I told him flatly that if he criticized the Darlan agreement at this juncture he would run the risk of jeopardizing the success of the United States Army in North Africa and would be rendering its task very much more difficult...
...Stimson, every decision could be measured by a single yardstick: did it help knock Germany out of the war? The best news he had heard after two years of war was the message Franklin Roosevelt carried home from Teheran in 1943: "I have thus brought OVERLORD (the Normandy landings plan) back to you safe and sound on the ways for accomplishment...
...Apologies. Single-minded Henry Stimson makes no apologies for his yardstick, which actually was big enough to measure only one phase of the global war, and inadequate for calculating the political possibilities. Thus he scorns Churchill's preference for "the right hook," which Stimson contends was intended only as a war of attrition in Italy and the Balkans, but which could actually have changed the course of history in Central Europe...