Witness to Disaster

The World War II memoirs of General Albert C. Wedemeyer, published under the peremptory title Wedemeyer Reports! (Holt, $6.00), is the most poignant and contemporary of all the apologias of the great captains of the West. While the Eisenhowers, Alanbrookes and Montgomerys celebrate their contributions to a past military triumph, intending no harm to their reputations, the late commander of the China theater is compelled to elaborate a massive political defeat the measure of which we have not yet taken—a defeat only explicable in terms of criminal ignorance in Washington, or treason. The literally honest and still tormented author of this epilogue to disaster entered history not as a victorious general but as an unwilling, often protesting, witness to the delivery of a loyal and strategically vital ally to world Communism,, a delivery impairing our hard-won command of the Pacific and opening the United States to unimaginable danger from the Asia Wedemeyer thought to secure for the free world.

So contemporary is the Wedemeyer story that the Quemoy crisis is its footnote. Since we learn only from history, when we do, we can best understand the defeatism, and worse, that now bids us abandon the offshore islands, Formosa and, in effect, our forward defenses in the Western Pacific by reference to the forces observed if not always identified by General Wedemeyer, which steadfastly procured disaster in China.

FD

About the Author

Forrest Davis

Featured Tags

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

The World War II memoirs of General Albert C. Wedemeyer, published under the peremptory title Wedemeyer Reports! (Holt, $6.00), is the most poignant and contemporary of all the apologias of the great captains of the West. While the Eisenhowers, Alanbrookes and Montgomerys celebrate their contributions to a past military triumph, intending no harm to their reputations, the late commander of the China theater is compelled to elaborate a massive political defeat the measure of which we have not yet taken—a defeat only explicable in terms of criminal ignorance in Washington, or treason. The literally honest and still tormented author of this epilogue to disaster entered history not as a victorious general but as an unwilling, often protesting, witness to the delivery of a loyal and strategically vital ally to world Communism,, a delivery impairing our hard-won command of the Pacific and opening the United States to unimaginable danger from the Asia Wedemeyer thought to secure for the free world.

So contemporary is the Wedemeyer story that the Quemoy crisis is its footnote. Since we learn only from history, when we do, we can best understand the defeatism, and worse, that now bids us abandon the offshore islands, Formosa and, in effect, our forward defenses in the Western Pacific by reference to the forces observed if not always identified by General Wedemeyer, which steadfastly procured disaster in China.