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x ~ non The Italian campaign seen from June 1944: the Fifth deny enters Rome ROME FELL TODAY. By Robert H. Adleman and Colonel George Walton. Dlustrated. Little, Brown. 336 pp. $7.95. By S. L. A. Marshall Soon after V-E Day I talked to the late General Lord “Pug” Ismay in London, being curious about why Winston Churchill had favored a main stroke into south central Europe from the top of the Adriatic as early as 1943. As secretary of the Imperial Defense Committee, Ismay should have been in position to know. It was startling to hear him say: “It wasn’t to thwart the Soviets and prevent communization of the Balkans; he didn’t speak to that point until 1945, shortly before Yalta.” Some weeks Jater in Frankfort, I quoted these words to my immediate chief, Lieutenant General Walter B. Smith, Chief of Steff. Smith replied: “How could Pug say such a thing? He’s dead wrong. At least twice in General S. L. A. Marshall was Chief Historian of the European Theater of Operations, United States Army, during World War II. How right can you get? “ arene ease yeeieeneaereee ee THE RIGHT PEOPLE: A Portrait of the American Social Establishment, By Stephen Birminghart. Wustrated. Little, Brown. 360 pp. $10. By Cleveland Amory The trouble with The Right People is it’s wrong. There ain’t no such animal. From time to time, particu- OM larly in periods of great stress or foolish dress, people like to think they exist — especially people with an ax to grind or fashion pages to sell — and books like The Beautiful People or Nancy Mitford's piece on v and non-U, make their appearance, But, upon analysis, the “right” people end up no righter than the writers who make their Hving first making them up and then writing But Mr. Birmingham should not be judged for. his book's thesis, wrong as it is, if for no other reason than that this is not really a book at all, let alone a thesis. It is, as he himself admits in his introduction, a collection of articles he wrote for Holiday on “Society and the institutions it supports.” Among the “institutions” Mr. Birmingham treats are private schools, debutantes, the Junior League, the Kept Man (help is awfully hard to get nowadays, as you may have heard) and the Knickerbocker Greys. (If you don’t know who they are —look at it this way, they a ae 1944, Winston talked to me on this score and once hy had tears in his eyes as he asked, ‘What if this wa ends with a free flag floating over not more than thre or four capitals in Europe?‘ ” Then Smith added: “It was the one point on which [ disagreed on strategy with the Supreme Commander. { thought we should have gone in through the Ljubljana Pass.” I asked: “And now, how can you say such a thing? Either that would have excluded Normandy, - would have had two centers of gravity on th, yn continent, And if it did exclude Normandy, what would it have profited us to liberate some of the Balkans and have the Red Flag come to rest on the shore of the North Sea?” . The anecdote may illuminate what « German general meant when he said that strategy is just so much spiced garbage, if it does not suggest that all military histor- ans are oddballs forever imagining that they can tell the story full and fair. Mr. Adleman and Colonel Walton did not really try, though they have collaborated on an entertsiningly brisk narrative about how and why the Italian cam- ras) By the same token if you believe that “Society :auners expect their sons to have learned by the time of their maturity to ride and respect horseflesh, to handle « firearm or a trout rod, to sail a beat, and to be kind to pedigreed dogs. Girls are expected only to be able to ride” — you are also going to enjoy it. Bur again, vice versa. Mr. Birmingham’s people may be well-born, but a good many of his stories are well-worn. My own least - favorite is the story of the New York father of a po- tential debutante who, according to Mr. Birmingham, said, “I'm not going to give a party so s lot of drunks and hopheads can rape my daughter. Such a story illustrates the fact that underneath his apparent lightness Mr. Birmingham is obviously in dead earnest about the snobbery of it all. Since he in.