Samuel Eliot Morison takes a broader view in his compact, thought-provoking little book, Strategy and Compromise . That is, although he too concerns himself primarily with sea power, it is the strategy of the entire war which engrosses him, and he discusses not so much what happened at sea as the basis on which strategic decisions were reached and the results that rame from them.

Both British and American readers, Mr. Morison remarks, seem to like to be told that their own country’s strategy was bad, and that their leaders made many stupid and costly mistakes. The difficulty, however, is to prove that alleged strategic errors were really errors, for the proof usually rests on the assumption that “if we had done something different the enemy would still have done the same thing that he actually did,” which usually is not true and in any case is unproven. Having said this, Mr. Morison goes on to assert that America and England were definitely mistaken in their wartime appraisal of Russia. AngloAmerican policy toward Russia during the war was based on two assumptions, both of which, says Mr. Morison, can now be shown to have been false: that Stalin would make a separate peace with Germany if not sufficiently supplied with war materiel and appeased by political concessions and that if we treated Russia “honorably and generously” Communist hostility would end and we would find Russia a dependable friend once the war ended.

Strategy and Compromise, by Samuel Eliot Morison. Little, Brown and Co. 120 pp. $3.00.

Essentially, the basic American strategic decision of the war was to “put forth our first and best efforts to the defeat of Germany.” In this decision, the British and American governments remained in agreement throughout. Where the arguments came was in the question regarding the way in which this strategy was to be made effective.

The original American idea was to land an army in France in 1942 and get on with the invasion of continental Europe. To this the British objected violently- partly because they did not believe the Americans could possibly be ready for such a large operation so soon and partly because they were obsessed with the desire to find some backdoor approach to the German stronghold. In the end, the American plan was shelved, and the North African invasion was substituted, with the cross-Channel operation deferred until 1944. This, Mr. Morison believes, was a correct decision; the trouble was that one step kept leading to another, culminating in a painful, step-by-step advance up the Italian boot, which he believes cost a good deal more than it was worth.

What finally happened—the major plan for beating Germany by a cross-Channel invasion in 1944—was a compromise between the original American idea, Churchill’s concept of “pecking away at the perimeter of Festung Europa until a weak spot was found,” and Sir Alan Brooke’s plan