THE STRATEGY OF TERROR — Edmond Taylor—Houghfon Mifflin ($2.50).
During the spring of 1940 the west of Europe felt the impact of a supremely methodical and ruthless military machine. That offensive, terrible as it was, was no better organized and perhaps no more effective than another kind of warfare which preceded it, accompanied it, and will continue. Representative governments and free peoples are the targets of these attacks. So it may be useful for the U. S. to understand them.
Of this warfare of the mind, Edmond Taylor's book is a lucid, cool and informative study. As Paris correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, Taylor watched the onset of Nazi psychological warfare, analyzed its effects on the French Government and people, learned what forms it took.
The real purpose of Nazi Propagandists Goebbels and staff, Taylor declares, "was not to convert outsiders to their cause as commercial propagandists do, but to demoralize the enemy, to destroy the cohesion, discipline and collective morale of hostile social groups." This was first fully realized by the French General Staff, to whom military intelligence furnished manuals worked out by a psychological laboratory connected with the German Ministry of Propaganda. Object: to aggravate and confuse the struggles of interests and political religions in western Europe. Of the two principal religions Taylor observes:
"One carried the banner 'Democracy,' the other 'Occidental Civilization.' Fundamentally there was no conflict between the two slogans, since neither meant anything concrete. Each one, however, served as the common bond between a number of discordant faiths polarized by the two extreme sects, Communists and Fascists, which it turned out later cared nothing respectively for either democracy or occidental civilization. ... In an emotional situation of this sort, propaganda becomes childishly easy. . . ."
By the summer of 1938 the disunity induced by the enemy in French public life amounted to a kind of multiple schizophrenia. Taylor's constant fairness is nowhere more apparent than in his explanation of the seemingly sound strategic reasons which led the French General Staff to acquiesce in the Munich settlement. But he feels that in respect to the psychological war, at that time still imperfectly understood by the Allies, Munich was a climax which very nearly ruined France. That France was not immediately ruined Taylor ascribes partly to a psychological change in Daladier. He volunteers a new and, he believes, authentic, story to explain that change: during the meeting at Munich, when Hitler sprang his famous trick—new demands even more severe than those the British and French had already rejected at Godesberg—Daladier completely lost his temper, stalked out of the room and slammed the door.