Secret of Victory

It was a Saturday afternoon and the Pentagon was virtually deserted when the top commanders of all the services crowded into Secretary of War Patterson's spacious office. They were there to hear Winston Churchill, who had come to renew his ties with the men he had known well during the war, to meet those he had known only from the communiques.

Leaning back against the Secretary's big desk, with shoulders hunched, Sandhurst-educated Winston Churchill talked easily, as one old soldier to his fellows. From the lines of a veteran who had served with his ancestor.* John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, he recalled an old, soldierly axiom:

God and the soldier we adore

In time of danger, not before;

The danger passed and all things righted,

God is forgotten and the soldier slighted.

Of the last danger just passed he also recalled: "I greatly admired the manner in which the American Army was formed, I think it was a prodigy of organization, of improvisation . . . the rate at which the small American Army of only a few hundred thousand men, not long before the war, created the mighty force of millions of soldiers, is a wonder in military history . . . an achievement which the soldiers of every other country will always study with admiration and with envy. . . .

"That you should have been able to preserve the art not only of creating armies almost at the stroke of a wand--but of leading and guiding these armies upon a scale incomparably greater than anything that was prepared for or even dreamed of, constitutes a gift made by the officer corps of the United States to their nation in time of trouble, which I earnestly hope will never be forgotten here. . . .

"The tendency in the future should be to prolong the courses of instruction at the colleges . . . and to equip our young officers with that special technical professional knowledge which soldiers have a right to expect from those who can give them orders if necessary to go to their deaths. . . . Professional attainment, based upon prolonged study . . . are the vital needs of the commanders of the future armies, and the secret of future victories."

* His great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.

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