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Seversky Technique. Preliminaries over, Sascha de Seversky gets right to the point, drilling at the idea that air power has created a new way of winning wars, by jumping over the enemy's army and navy to strike directly at his war industries and thus paralyze him at the source of his power. He has only scorn for "military men of the old school" who fail to understand this new weapon. The film vividly depicts the failure of French land power, of British sea power in Norway and Crete. Only at Dunkirk and in the Battle of Britain was the string of German triumphs checked; that, as Seversky explains it, was because the Luftwaffe, primarily trained to clear the way for ground forces, met its master in the R.A.F., an air force truly designed for air combat.
Yet now the Allies have learned the lesson. Can they go on to win simply by raising bigger armies, by outbuilding and crushing the enemy with planes and tanks? Seversky thinks not. He bases his opinions on geographic facts. The Axis powers, he explains, are fighting on interior lines, with relatively short, straight channels of supply. Allied lines of communication are strung out all over the globe, along risky and roundabout routes.
Victory Technique. Seversky likens Germany to an iron wheel whose rim (the fighting fronts) is supported by straight spokes (supply lines) radiating from a central hub (war industry). So long as the Allies pound at the rim the enemy can always move his power to meet the impact. By striking at the hub with air power, they can collapse the whole structure; then the surface forces can move in to clinch the victory, with a vast saving of life.
Present-day bombers, with their striking radius of 1,000 miles, may be able to carry out the job of cracking up Germany, Seversky says, but they can scarcely do the trick against Japan, with a sphere of domination three times that of Germany.
Major de Seversky's formula for victory over Japan is the merciless bombing of Japanese industrial centers by super-long-range aircraft based in Alaska. He and Disney combine in a crashing finale showing the huge bombers, bristling with guns aimed by range finders which blast down any fighter planes that approach them, carrying bombs of unheard-of power and destruction. Such planes will be built, Seversky says, and the U.S. is the only nation in a position to tool up and build them right away. (Sascha's critics answer that argument with the comment: "You can't win this war with the next war's airplanes.")
As must be expected in a highly topical film, Seversky has his muffs and his good catches. Perhaps he overplays the submarine's future menace—although it is too soon to be sure of that. On the other hand, he has a prophetic sequence showing the mining and destruction of an enemy power dam, made six months before the R.A.F. wrecked the Möhne and Eder dams.