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How the War Will End. Hardly had the bombs ceased to fall on Pearl Harbor when lay strategists set to work to plan the "proper" course of war. Naked, overwhelming air power was Seversky's dream. Lieut. Colonel William Fergus Kernan made a stirring and, history has proved, almost too timely plea for the use of offensive tactics against the Axis from bases in North Africa, in Defense Witt Not Win the War ($1.50). Attack on Japan through the Aleutian Islands was the strategy of Alexander Kiralfy in Victory in the Pacific ($2.75). Attack was the keynote of Max Werner's The Great Offensive ($3), of William Ziff's The Coming Battle of Germany ($2.50), of Hanson Baldwin's Strategy for Victory ($1.75). Behind the lines Liberal Herbert Agar called on civilians for the same show of fighting belief, in A Time For Greatness ($2.50).
Controversy. Angriest disagreement of the year was over Novelist John Steinbeck's The Moon Is Down ($2). Author Steinbeck's portrayal of morally superior Norwegians gradually sapping the rigid militarism of their Nazi conquerers drew criticism on the grounds that it gave people the idea that guilt was enough to undermine the Germans. Said Humorist James Thurber: "This little book needs more guts and less moon." Said New Yorker Critic Clifton Fadiman, in one of the year's most mixed metaphors: "It seduces us to rest on the oars of our moral superiority." Fadiman himself believed that "the only way to make a German understand is to kill him. . . ." Nevertheless, The Moon Is Down has sold almost 500,000 copies, including Book-of-the-Month Club sales.
"This May Hurt a Little." Blandest suggestion of the year came from matted, bell-tolling Novelist Ernest Hemingway.
Said Hemingway, in his preface to the impressive collected stories Men at War ($3): "Germany should be so effectively destroyed that we should not have to fight her again for a hundred years, or ... forever. This can probably only be done by sterilization [of] all members of Nazi party organizations." The virile, well-equipped novelist admitted that his suggestion should not be advocated now, as it would provoke "increased resistance" by the would-be victims. But, he pointed out, with an air of self-possession: Sterilization is "little more painful than vaccination."
Fiction for a Cause. Several other authors, though they were less controversially absorbed in the basic questions of life & death, were clearly interested either in helping the war along or in getting a boost from it, or both. Pearl Buck's best-selling Dragon Seed ($2.50) was a heartfelt poster depicting a Chinese peasant family under the impact of invasion. In Put Out More Flags ($2.50), one of the year's funniest, most brilliant and more questionable books, Evelyn Waugh affectionately satirized England's upper classes, murderously satirized her artists, leftists and poor, and wound up among the Commandos waving every non-satiric flag in sight. In his foaming You Can't Be Too Careful ($2.50) H. G. Wells sometimes arrestingly sketched the recent history of Homo subsapiens, offered pathetically oversimple rationalistic methods by which man might be brought to his senses.