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% om 7 dune 1944: the Fifth Army enters Rome The Ttalian campaign seen from ROME FELL TODAY. By Robert H. Adleman and Colonel George Walton. Diustrated. Little, Brown. 335 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 later in Frankfort, ] quoted these words to my immediate chief, Lieutenant General Walter B. Smith, Chief of Staff. 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 Porld War II, How right can you get? . eeeeEeeEeEaE—————eeE— THE RICHT PEOPLE: A Portrait of the American Social Establishment. By Stephen Birminghart. Iustrated. 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- 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 U and non-U, make their appearance. But, upon analysis, the “right” people end up no righter than the writers who make thair ving 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 we ae tees, 1944, Winston talked to me on this acoré 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 Earope?* ” Then Smith added: “It was the one point on which I disagreed on strategy with the Supreme Commander. I thought we should have gone in through the Ljubljana Pass.” - | 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 sn 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 ifluminate what a German general meant when he said that strategy is just so much spiced garbage, if it does not suggest that all military histor- ians are oddballs forever imagining that they can tell the story full and fair. Mr. Adleman and Colonel Walton did not really uy, though they have collaborated on an brisk narrative about how and why the Italian cam- a“ By the same token if you believe that “Society 1 oners 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 ta be kind to pedigreed dogs. Girls are expected only to be able to ride” — you are also going to enjoy it. But 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 eo a 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 is.