On a Tightrope

(See Cover)

The President of the U.S. this week asked Congress for $1,130,000,000 to help arm America's European allies. Said Lieut. General Albert Wedemeyer, U.S. Army Director of Plans & Operations: "This is one of the critical moments of our history. I mean that."

"We Prefer Death." The Military Assistance Program (M.A.P.) faced a far harder fight and a closer vote than the North Atlantic Treaty (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). Opponents of the arms plan say that it will cost too much, and that it might provoke Soviet Russia to attack. The plan's advocates reply that a Communist victory in Europe would be far more expensive for the U.S., and that Soviet Russia is provoked to aggressive acts by the weakness, not by the strength, of the non-Communist world.

The Atlantic pact would be meaningless unless the European allies were able to defend themselves when attacked. They had the will to do this, and the manpower; they did not have the weapons. Only the U.S. could provide the weapons soon enough. U.S. refusal to provide them would have a shattering effect on Western Europe's morale.

Western Europe's nations know that the U.S. would come to their aid if the Russians attacked; they also know that, unless they have arms at least to delay the

Russians, U.S. aid could not arrive before they were defeated. The U.S. would then again have to liberate the Continent. After another war and Russian rule, not much would be left to liberate. Said a Belgian staff colonel: "We are not interested in being liberated after an occupation. Rather than this we prefer death."

"Girl Not Like Drink." Western Europeans last week relaxed on the beaches, went fishing or drank beer in the warm evenings. But amid this summer somnolence, people anxiously waited to see how the great debate in Washington would go. The man who perhaps waited most anxiously of all was a beak-nosed French general, eight times wounded and 41 times decorated, whom few Americans knew.

General Jean Joseph Marie Gabriel de Lattre de Tassigny is commander in chief --theoretically--of West Europe's land forces, and the man to whom the most crucial task would fall if the Russians attacked tomorrow. He is also the most striking member of a strange military organism known as Uniforce, which for nine months has quietly tried to plan the defense of Western Europe. The progress & problems of Uniforce throw a light on the issue before the U.S. Congress.

The seat of Uniforce is Fontainebleau, the carved and corniced residence of French kings. Sky-blue R.A.F. uniforms stand guard side by side with French khaki. British and French are making honest efforts to understand each other. The Scottish reel, introduced by highlanders stationed at Fontainebleau, has been taken up enthusiastically by French and Belgian soldiers; Scotsmen, though, are still shocked to hear their reeling allies cry "Hola!" instead of "Och!" A correspondent last week overheard the following conversation outside a guardroom between an R.A.F. corporal and a French private:

Britain: A quelle heure voo etes off duty?

France: Comment?

Britain: Quand partay voo?

France: Bouge pas, moi.

Britain: Non, I mean ce soir, quand voo partay.

France: Ah yes, my friend, je I'emmene au cinema.

Britain: Voulez-voo prendre un drink apres ?

France: Non, girl not like drink.

Britain: Non, I mean apres girl partee, nous avons drink.

France: Non, girl not like drink.

A Matter of Where & If. Behind these scenes of Western Union fraternity lies an unprecedented peacetime experiment in military organization. The Western Union defense setup was established last year by the Brussels pact between Great Britain, France and Benelux. It is headed by the five nations' defense ministers; under them is a committee of the five nations' chiefs of staff, which drafts directives for the commanders of the Western Union land, air and sea forces and their staffs. Together these are called Uniforce. The land forces (Uniter) are under De Lattre; the air forces (Uniair) under Britain's Air Chief Marshal Sir James Robb; and the naval forces (Uniair) under France's Vice Admiral Robert Jaujard, chief flag officer for Western Union. Standing over all, coordinating Uniforce's three services, is Britain's indomitable, irascible Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein.

Uniforce looks exactly like a command headquarters, although it has no troops to command. Most of the concrete progress at Fontainebleau has been on the technical level. Map work and photographic interpretation have been standardized, as well as some technical equipment, such as naval couplings, which will permit ships of all Western Union navies to refuel one another at sea. The metric linear measure system has been accepted by Western Union artillery, but centigrade has not yet triumphed over Fahrenheit. Basic manuals for all Western Union forces will be published. The five sovereign nations have not, however, exchanged their secret codes.

Within its three branches, Uniforce has achieved a high and heartening degree of cooperation. Cabled a U.S. correspondent last week: "Some Uniter staff conferences I have attended would be eye-openers to those who believe that Europeans can never really unite. Decisions are taken more slowly than they would in an ordinary national staff. But when a decision is reached, it goes right down the line, from Frenchman to Briton to Frenchman to Belgian to Briton to Dutchman to Frenchman, and is executed."

But there is one fundamental division which splits Fontainebleau. That is the question of where Western Europe is to be defended. The difference arises from the fact that the British ask not only "where" but "if."

A Matter of Hopes & Fears. Chief antagonists in the running strategic argument at Fontainebleau are Montgomery and De Lattre, who are incompatible personally because they are so much alike. Both are vain and flamboyant, both love authority and leadership. But the basic division is not one of personality: it cuts far deeper, into national hopes & fears. Fundamentally, the British distrust the French and do not believe that France and Western Europe could be successfully defended against attack. They foresee only another Dunkirk and want to keep their military commitments on the Continent to a minimum. The British attitude toward the defense of the Continent is parallel to the distrust of "European entanglements" by those U.S. leaders who oppose the Atlantic pact and M.A.P.

None of the strategists considering Western Europe's defense thinks in terms of rigid, Maginot-like lines; all the plans provide for flexible defense. But roughly speaking three plans have been advanced involving three defense lines, i.e., the Channel, the Rhine and the Elbe.

The British, the most pessimistic, favor a defense starting, at best, on the Rhine but expected to fall back across the Channel.

U.S. military planners consider a firm

Rhine defense feasible. Their strategy is based on the assumption that, prior to a Rhine crossing, the Red army would have to mass in force on the east bank. In that position, overwhelming air power--including atomic bombardment--might be able to defeat it, or at least to delay it until U.S. forces reach Europe.

The French plan is the most optimistic. De Lattre favors a bold offensive defense, including not merely the Western Union countries, but all Atlantic pact nations, forming a wide arc from Scandinavia along the Elbe to Italy and possibly to the Middle East (see map).

A Matter of Faith. This Franco-British disagreement on future strategy affects present decisions. "When we want to step up production of antitank mines," explained one Uniter officer, "the British say there are more urgent needs for explosives. I would feel the same way if I were sitting behind the Channel, which is a better antitank ditch than most."

The only factor which can settle the Franco-British conflict is U.S. aid. If the U.S. provides enough, the British may well change their minds about the hopelessness of Western Europe's defense. France would provide at least half of any Western Union land force; therefore the heart of the matter, according to De Lattre, is whether the U.S. has faith in France. He believes that the way to resolve the conflict between him and Montgomery is to appoint an American commander of Uniforce.

De Lattre realizes that the U.S. has a right to ask whether France has the vigor to deserve such faith. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny himself is a violent, living assertion that France does.

Up from the Dragoons. When Premier Paul Ramadier, then Minister of Defense, asked De Lattre last year to take the post at Fontainebleau (after France's able General Alphonse Juin had turned it down), De Lattre told friends that he thought the job was "impossible." He nevertheless accepted it, telling Ramadier that he was committing an "act of faith." His life has been a series of such acts.

He is a son of the village of Mouilleron-en-Pareds, in the Vendee region. The house where he was born (in 1889) today stands unchanged, to the faded family photographs and the crucifixes on the wall of each room. It is still inhabited by Jean's father, who has been mayor of the village for 38 years; at 94, he plans to retire soon. Young Jean used to mount his father's great Dane, and charge through the garden with warlike shouts. Soon he graduated to horses, the wilder the better, and frightened the villagers by daring charges across rocks and hills.

After three years at St. Cyr, France's West Point, young De Lattre became a lieutenant in the dragoons. He saw action in World War I; in 1921, a captain, he began service under France's late great Marshal Hubert Lyautey in Morocco; in 1929 De Lflttre was called to the general staff. By 1939, at 50, he was the youngest general in the French army.

De Lattre was also one of the army's hardest taskmasters. A colonel who served on his staff tells a story: "One night the general returned from a staff meeting to divisional headquarters with a strategic problem. He called me in with two other officers about dinnertime, asked our views on the problem, then told us to go back and put our ideas on paper. That took us till 3 in the morning. He read all the papers, said, 'Excellent, excellent,' then talked for 30 minutes tearing them to bits. Then he divided the problem into three parts, gave us each one part, and asked us to go back and write another memorandum. When we turned that in a couple of hours later, he slapped us on the back, took us home to his billet, shouted Madame de Lattre out of bed, had some eggs fried and coffee made for all, then sent us off to sleep. That morning at 9, fresh and cordial, he showed us a 15-page analysis of the problem which he had written since we saw him."

The Path of Napoleon. De Lattre and his 14th Infantry Division were posted at Rethel, near Reims, when the Nazis struck in May 1940. His was one of the handful of French units that showed up well amid general disaster; he hurled the Germans back six times before the crumbling line on his left flank forced the French command to order his retreat. He retreated fighting. Yet he found time to analyze the causes of the French defeat and to apply the lessons in practice. By picking up stray trucks and equipment wherever he could, he managed to reorganize his units into some semblance of a motorized division with greatly strengthened fire power.

When the end came, France's surrender government refused De Lattre permission to go to Britain, where he hoped to carry on the fight. In unoccupied France, he created the first of a series of officers' training schools. In 1942, when the Nazis took over unoccupied France, he marched his troops out for battle. When his Vichy superiors sent an order to remain in barracks, he went white with anger, tore the message to shreds. "Never will I receive the Germans at my headquarters," he shouted at the terrified orderly.

For his defiance of Vichy's orders, De Lattre was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment at Riom. His wife smuggled him a small metal saw hidden in a bunch of flowers and a ten-yard rope wrapped in his laundry. He escaped, went underground and, hiding behind a freshly grown beard, made his way to London and Algiers, where he joined De Gaulle's Free French. He took over Army "B" (later the French First Army), landed it in the south of France and took it up the Rhone valley to the Rhine and the Danube. The First became proudly known as the "Rhine & Danube" Army. He crossed the Rhone on D-day plus 15, when the crossing was actually planned for sometime between D plus 30 and D plus 60. His sappers and bridging equipment had not arrived, but he commandeered every boat, plank and carpenter for miles around, and put 10,000 men and 3,000 trucks across the river in 48 hours. He repeated this tour de force when he crossed the Rhine.

To most Westpointed U.S. officers commanding the temperamental De Lattre, he was hard to stomach. He had a supreme disregard for carefully planned strategy. (Says he: "The battle of the Marne was not won by a committee or a plan.") At one point during the fighting, the U.S. command ordered him to fall back to a new line, evacuate Strasbourg; he flatly refused. Another time, he attacked Ulm against instructions because Napoleon had captured Ulm.

The Victory of Springtime. A U.S. correspondent describes how De Lattre held briefings: "He would stride up & down, describing every move with his delicate hands, drawing himself up on tiptoe, clenching his fists and shivering or mopping his brow to express cold or heat." He was moody. An American who worked with him says: "Frequently a U.S. officer visiting De Lattre would find him hunched over his desk, holding his head in his hands. The natural reaction of the American would be: 'The man's crazy.' '

Once, during the battle of the Colmar pocket, De Lattre's superior, U.S. General Jacob Devers, put the XXI U.S. Army Corps under his command (other U.S. officers were outraged by this move). Throughout the fighting, Devers kept up a stream of suggestions to De Lattre via field telephone. Finally De Lattre exploded: "If you want me to run this battle, leave me alone. If you want to run it, come here and take over." Devers, who respects De Lattre as a first-rate soldier, smiled: "I was wondering how soon he would say that."

Sometimes he was pushed to defy orders from his U.S. superiors when General de Gaulle gave him contrary orders. When De Gaulle heard that the armistice was to be signed in Berlin without a French representative, he ordered De Lattre to go straight to Berlin without asking anyone's permission and to sign; De Lattre went and signed--as a witness. Then he issued one of his Napoleonic orders of the day: "The day of victory has arrived . . . victory of May, radiant victory of springtime, which gives back to our France her youth, her strength and her hope . . ."

At his headquarters on the shores of Lake Constance, he gave a farewell party for General Devers which still lingers in U.S. Army memories. The party started at 3 p.m. at one end of the lake and ended twelve hours later at the other end. Devers and his dazed colleagues passed through a two-mile line-up of Moroccan goumiers holding flaming torches aloft. In the garden adjoining his residence, De Lattre had ordered platforms constructed in the trees; as the guests sat down to eat & drink, spotlights picked out choruses seemingly suspended among the leaves. "To him this wasn't flamboyant," said an American. "It was just right."

For National Resurrection. Jean de Lattre's greatest act of faith and skill was his postwar reorganization of the French army, carried on with the backing of capable General Georges Revers, now chief of staff of all French armed forces. Americans trying to decide whether Western Europe can defend itself better than it did in 1940 will find interesting evidence in De Lattre's ideas of how the French army should be rebuilt.

When De Gaulle appointed him chief of staff and inspector general of the army, De Lattre stated a premise: "Today it is necessary to prepare our youth for a national resurrection." In the past, few French generals had worried about the souls of their soldiers. The center of French army life had been the caserne, a dank, prisonlike barracks building usually found on the outskirts of many French towns, where the French recruits underwent rigid, dull, impractical training. The caserne taught them tolerable parade ground manners, outmoded book knowledge about arms, and how to pick up after the colonel's horse. They rarely received any practical field training; maneuvers were little more than chess games with living rooks and bishops in which the senior officers could exercise their wits.

A caserne alumnus last week recalled the first time he faced the enemy in 1940: "It's true, they had taught me to shoot and I had seen grenades before. But when it came to reality we found we weren't prepared for a thing. Our own helplessness terrified us more than the German tanks."

New Army with Tablecloths. De Lattre's answer to the caserne is the "light camp," which provides completely new army life and training methods--new at least for France. (So far one-third of France's recruits go to the light camps.) A TIME correspondent last week visited the camp Uger at Frileuse of the 93rd Infantry Regiment, a proud unit which fought well with De Lattre. Its permanent caserne near Paris now contains only a few guard and administrative details. Said the officer of the day: "We don't even want the recruits to see the place."

What the recruits do see is the light camp in the rolling countryside beyond Versailles, a day's march from the caserne. The low, modern, well-built barracks (no more than twelve men to a building) are situated on sunbathed hillsides and constructed (according to De Lattre's express orders) with special attention to the view. With pride, the army calls these buildings "chalets." Each has modern plumbing, showers, a separate workroom where men can putter about as they please. De Lattre himself has described furnishings of the chalets: "The room is large and well lit, practical comfort being allied with order and sobriety ... In the center, armchairs, tables and reading lamps are arranged in living-room fashion . . . The dining room ... is well kept and gay --curtains, flowers, tablecloths and luxuries which cost little. Next to the dining room is a small pantry equipped with electric hot plates, which permit the platoon leader to call his men to meals virtually whenever he pleases, without being a slave to the kitchen timetable . . ."

The general who introduced tablecloths and hot plates into the French army also introduced some of the toughest training and the most rigid discipline any army ever saw. His chief instrument of training is a tougher, more elaborate version of the American obstacle course, known as La Piste du Risque, where green recruits two weeks after their induction crawl on their bellies under live machine-gun fire. Another training device is the "nightmare alley," a dark grotto in which targets keep popping out at the rookie (see cut).

New Task with Will to Win. France's army today has 644,000 men, 169,000 of whom are fighting in Indo-China. When it is pointed out to De Lattre that about one-fifth of all Frenchmen are Communists (either party members or voters), he replies that Communism generally is on the decline in France and that in the army Communists have been removed from key jobs. He calls any suggestion that France will not defend herself against a Red attack "blasphemy."

What De Lattre has been trying to do in the French army is perhaps best summarized by a sentence on La Piste du Risque in his training instructions: "Little by little, we must create a superiority complex in the men without which the will to win cannot exist."

Since De Lattre assumed his duties at Fontainebleau, he has transferred his own mighty will to win (and his occasional flashes of superiority complex) to the service of Western Union's great dream. He works as hard as ever, keeps his customary irregular, almost Russian, office hours. He commutes between Fontainebleau and Paris in a Citroen driven at top speed (he also has a Cadillac, a Hotchkiss, and a Delahaye). With his wife Simone, who does social work in the veterans' club of her husband's old "Rhine & Danube" Army, he lives in a quiet house overlooking the Pare Monceau. His 22-year-old son, who began service in his father's army at 16, is in Indo-China. De Lattre is nervous when things go smoothly, calm when the going gets rough. He says: "I like to live on a tightrope."

Last week, as the going got rough in Washington, De Lattre was calm. Said his wife: "He has got very patient since he has gone to Fontainebleau--as patient as when he was in prison." Patiently, the man on a tightrope was waiting for America to commit an act of faith.

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