CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
KEEPING YOUR MEN INFORMED
Nobody ever told the South Sea savage about the nature of air in motion. He had never heard of wind and therefore could not imagine its effects. Thus when he heard strange noises in the treetops and there was a howling around certain headlands, while other headlands were silent, he could believe only that the spirits were at work. He would strain his ear to hear what they had to say to him, and never being able to understand, he would become all the more fearful.
It all sounds pretty silly. And yet civilization is a great deal like that. We pride ourselves today in saying, particularly within the western nations, that men and women are better informed than ever before in the history of the world. What we really mean by that is that they are overburdened with more kinds of fragmentary information than any people of the past. They know just enough about many major questions of the day that either they are driven to the making of fearful guesses about the unknown, or they try to close their minds to the subject, vainly seeking consolation in the half-truth, "What I don't know can't hurt me."
Therein lies a great part of the problem. For it is a fair statement that if all of the mystery could be stripped from such a complex topic as the nature of atomic power, so that men everywhere would understand it, universal fear would be displaced by universal confidence that something could be done, and society would be well along the road toward its control.
In World War I, the men who had the least fear of the effects of gas warfare were the gas officers who understood their subject right down to the last detail of the decontamination process and the formula for dichlorethylsulphide (mustard gas). The man to whom the dangers of submarine warfare seem least fearsome is the submariner. Of all hands along the battle line, the first aid man has the greatest calm and confidence in the face of fire, largely because he has seen the miracles worked by modern medicine in the restoring of grievously wounded men. The general or the admiral who is most familiar with the mettle of his subordinate commands will also have the most relaxed mind under battle pressure.
This leads to a point, which it is better to state here than anywhere else. In all military instruction pertaining to the weapons and techniques of war, the basis of sound indoctrination is the teaching that weapons when rightly used will invariably produce victory, and preventive measures, when promptly and thoroughly taken, will invariably conserve the operational integrity of the defense. It is wrong, dead wrong, to start, or carry along, on the opposite track, and try to persuade men to do the right thing, by dwelling on the awful consequence of doing the wrong thing. Confidence, not fear, is the keynote of a strong and convictive doctrine.
In war, in the absence of information, man's natural promptings alternate between unreasoning fears that the worst is likely to happen, and the wishful thought that all danger is remote. Either impulse is a barrier to the growth of that condition of alert confidence which comes to men when they have a realization of their own strength and a reasonably clear concept of the general situation.
Man is a peculiar animal. He is no more prone to think about himself as the central figure amid general disaster than he is to dwell morbidly upon thoughts of his own death. Left in the dark, he will get a certain comfort out of that darkness, at the same time that it clouds his mind and freezes his action. Disturbed by bad dreams about what might happen, he nonetheless will not plan an effective use of his own resources against that which is very likely to happen. Only when he is given a clear view of the horizon, and is made animated by the general purpose in all that moves around him, does he understand the direction in which he should march, and taking hold, begin to do the required thing.
It is almost gratuitous that this even needs to be stated. No high commander would think of moving deliberately into the fog of war if he was without knowledge of either the enemy or friendly situation. Even to imagine such a contingency is paralyzing. But in their nervous and spiritual substance, admirals and generals are no different than the green men who have come most recently to their forces. Such men can not stand alone any more than can the recruit. They draw their moral strength and their ability to contend intelligently against adverse circumstance largely from what is told them by the men who surround them. That is why they have their staffs. They could not command even themselves if they were deprived of all information.