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NON-FICTION The war, the uneasy peace and the many-directioned search for personal and world repose accounted for most of the year's best-read books. No war books achieved the popularity of Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe or Sherwood's Roosevelt and Hopkins. From Winston Churchill came Their Finest Hour, the stately, grandly stated second volume of his World War II memoirs. Britain's Field Marshal Montgomery went on with his battle report in El Alamein to the River Sangro, but its army-manual style limited its appeal chiefly to professional soldiers. A more dramatic soldier's story, important and unfortunately neglected, was Polish Lieut. General Anders' account of his army's sacrifices and betrayals, An Army in Exile. U.S. big brass, hounded by publishers and eager ghostwriters, combed memories, diaries and official records to get their stories on the record. Hard-boiled Major General Claire Chennault had a field day with U.S. blundering in China in Way of a Fighter, and General "Howlin' Mad" Smith lashed out at high-level boners in his story of what happened to his marines in the Pacific. General "Hap" Arnold's yarn-spinning Global Mission was twice too long but important for any student of the war in the air. Blunt, down-to-earth and unghosted was General George Kenney's General Kenney Reports, a day-by-day account of his job and of the air war in the Southwest Pacific. Best of the books on the war at sea were Volume IV (Coral Sea} and Volume V (Guadalcanal) of Harvard Professor Samuel Eliot Morison's massive history of the Navy in World War II. What war at sea meant for the Germans was compactly set down in Anthony Martienssen's Hitler and His Admirals, written from captured Nazi records. One book seemed certain to become a minor classic of its kind: British Captain Russell Grenfell's The Bismarck Episode, a terse description of the pursuit and destruction of the mighty German battleship in the greatest sea hunt in naval history. Of the books of personal war experiences, two were outstanding: Norwegian Odd Nansen's From Day to Day, a grim report, set down with dignity, of what he saw as a prisoner in various German concentration camps; and Briton F. Spencer Chap man's The Jungle Is Neutral, an expertly written story of his life as a guerrilla soldier in Japanese-held Malaya. Detractors and worshipers of F.D.R. took a relative breather. The opening of most of his personal papers to researchers next March probably meant an approaching rain of biographical books: John Gunther's inside F.D.R. had already been announced. But only the President's wife and his secretary had much to add in 1949. In F.D.R., My Boss, Grace Tully set down such between-dictation details as she had observed in nearly 17 stenographic years. Eleanor Roosevelt's This I Remember was the historically valuable reminiscing of a wife who concluded that "I was one of those who served his purposes." Solid to Fascinating. Most of the year's good biographies had literary figures for their subjects. Others ranged from worthy-solid (Historian Samuel Flagg Bemis' authoritative but somewhat unwieldy career study of John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy} to fascinating (Richard Aldington's The Strange Life of Charles Waterton, an en gaging story of an English eccentric and