TEACHING HISTORY

Evening Star, Issue 20150, 15 April 1929, Page 9

TEACHING HISTORY

REMINDERS TO AMERICANS Under the heading ‘How About a Little Credit to Their Men?’ the following letter appeared in a recent issue of the ‘ San Francisco Chronicle ’ :—- “Editor, the ‘Chronicle’—Sir, Albert Feller would be surprised at many stranger things than that Foeh is considered the greatest war general, if he got his information of the war from any other place than in newspaper communiques and magazine articles. Does lie know, for instance, that ‘ Black Jack ’ Pershing would have been relieved of the American command for taking foolhardy chances and losing thousands of men unnecessarily at St. Mihiel, but that it was ‘ impolitic ’ to shatter the home morale at that time?

“ Did lie over hear of the British Fourth and Fifth Armies, or Gallipoli, or the Piave? I. wonder! Or of why ‘ Papa ’ Joffro lapsed into sudden obscurity? He lias not been able to grasp the picture, evidently, of the Allied lino crumbling at every point, staved in apparently at its strongest salients, the enemy apparently unstoppable, Paris bombed and shelled, hope gone—and then one man in control, who, like a feather-weight after Dempsey, send a blow here, now there, never ceasing, never twice in the same place, till the giant stops, bewildered, brushes at a blinded eye, to get one in the solar plexus—can’t get his breath, and finally, in fear, turns round linn boringly, and dogs it ‘out of here,’ to be ham-strung in the process. “ Only one other figure in the war can be compared to Foch, and he died early in the struggle—Gallicni.—Jack Hale, San Francisco, January 29, 1929.”