When you make war on them you cannot crush and conquer them by surprise as the Germans have the Poles, the Dutch, the Belgians, the French even. They will take time to get ready, and when at long last they feel ready they will be cautious, make sure of their rear, and advance inch by inch, at snail’s pace—not a bit like the Russian armies you admire so much. Moral: do not go to war with the slow, stupid Anglo-Saxons, unless you feel materially and morally ready to have it long and devastating.—Bernard Berenson, Rumor and ReflectionJuly 1944December 7, 1941, the day that lives in infamy, brought the American art establishment face to face with the realities of protection long since forced upon its European colleagues. If the Japanese had managed to cross thousands of miles of ocean undeterred to turn the huge military complex at Pearl Harbor into a smoking shambles, it seemed quite possible that they could do the same to San Francisco, and the increasing successes of the German U-boat fleet in the Atlantic underlined the vulnerability of the eastern seaboard.
