Trouble, Strategic Insight

Abstract

The world was on fire. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland: gone. France, a Great Power by any reckoning eighteen months before, had been crushed by German armies in a matter of weeks. The Balkans and North Africa were ablaze. Much of China had been overrun by Japan in a war of stark barbarity that was four years old, and showed no signs of abating. Britain, assailed from the air and beset by sea, hung by a thread. The Mediterranean was impassable. In Central Asia ten million Soviet and German soldiers were locked in annihilatory combat along a thousand-mile front. It was on such a Sunday afternoon that my mother walked downstairs to my father's shop and said, "Honey, I just heard on the radio that the Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor." And then, my dad told me, he put down his tools and said, "There's going to be trouble."