Admiral William D. Leahy served this country in series of exacting commands at an age alien most shippers are in retirement. As our Ambassador at Vichy, as Chief of Staff to President Roosevelt and later to President Truman, and as a member of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, he participated in many a crucial decision during the momentous years. For an appraisal of his new book, we turn to RICHARD E, DANIELSON, who screed in Military Intelligence in both wars.

In the late autumn of 1943, thanks to high-frequency electronic research and unlimited audacity, the Allied air-sea forces at last began to thwart the U-boat offensive. This is the heroic story which REAR ADMIRAL SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON, USNR (Ret.) tells in his new booh. The Atlantic Battle Won, from which these episodes have been drawn. This is the tenth volume in his magnificent history of our Navy in the Second World War.

A Baltimorean who graduated from the United States Naval Academy and who subsequently saw service aboard our destroyers and battleships, HANSON W. BALDWIN has been the military editor of the New York Times since 1912, in which year his articles earned him the Pulitzer Prize. In the preparation of an extended history of the Second World War, he has added up the most costly mistakes which we made in the conflict. There are six of them; they all stem from our original misreading of the Russian mind. In prose which is absorbing if sometimes painful reading, they will be analyzed in this and the February issue.

DIXON WECTER has succeeded Bernard DeVoto as Literary Editor of the Mark Twain estate. In August of last year he and his wife made the trip by riverboat down the Mississippi with Mark’s pilot book to help him pick up some of the old landmarks. Now he is back at his desk in the Huntington Library, where as Chairman of the Research Group he will continue his editing of the letters and papers of Mark Twain.