June 1958 | Volume 9, Issue 4 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