PASSING THE BUCK

They sell their lives as dearly in peace as they should do in war—so the plaint of one reviewer in the years after the Second World War, when the generals on the Allied side flooded the market with memoirs written by or for them, proving how each of them had outwitted all others and would, if permitted, have won the war single-handed. Even at the time one had taken such claims with much salt and realized how blinkered and distorted were their views; only now do we know how much these victorious heroes had suppressed. None of them mentioned, for example, the considerable advantage they had secured from the information provided by the breakers of the opponent’s codes, and how in many cases this silent, unassuming effort of men and women working far in the rear of the battle-fronts had made the vital difference between defeat and success.