[...]

There were about 300 of us students in the school, which was a one-man operation run by Hans Habe, the captain who had interviewed me the previous day. He turned out to be a fellow ex-Hungarian, son of Imre Békessy, a notorious Viennese yellow journalist, who was banned for life from Vienna by a judger, who was frustrated by the fact that Austrian criminal law provided no punishment for extorting money for not publishing embarrassing or incriminating evidence and was thus unable to send him to prison. I knew all that, because Békessy, on being expelled from Vienna, moved to Budapest and offered his dubious services to all the Hungarian politicians and bank presidents, including my father, who, though the mildest and gentlest person I have ever known, threw him out of his office. There must have been others like him in those parts of the world at that time, because mother's and my favourite opera, Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, contains two such characters, Valzacchi and Annina.

His son was a colourful, highly gifted journalist in Vienna, who had changed his name, because Békessy was too disreputable a name in Austria for a reputable journalist to write under. He fled to France when Hitler annexed Austria, enrolled in the French Foreign Legion, became a prisoner of war of the Germans, escaped, wrote his best seller, How I Escaped Hitler, and coming to the United States, soon became the US Army's propaganda expert. I could sense that he must also be tremendously attractive to women and found my instinct confirmed decades later, when I read his fascinating autobiography, All My Sins.

In Gettysburg, however, he was only on his third wife, the heiress to Post Toasties cereals and adopted daughter of Joseph Davies, the US ambassador to Moscow at the time. She fell in love with him when she helped him emigrate to the United States; and he promptly divorced his German wife, the heiress to the Tungsram Lightbulb fortune, in order to marry her.

Habe held classes from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. seven days of an eight-day week on a variety of subjects, having his orderly, Sgt Atlasz, another fellow ex-Hungarian, spray his throat between classes against hoarseness. At 7:30, each of us received a copy of that day's New York Times, with its short summary of contents cut out, and were given 45 minutes to write a summary of the paper with the most important items placed first and the least important ones omitted. Thereafter Habe explained what items and which parts of each were the most important for propaganda purposes and why. By the following morning he had read and graded all our papers.

In other classes, we wrote short papers for news-sheets and broadcasts, practised making broadcasts, in French or German, with everything very intelligently discussed and criticized by Habe, who also pointed out differences in the composition of headings and arrangement of pages between American and European practice. Other classes dealt with the making of propaganda posters, since Habe was not only a highly skilled and experienced journalist but had also been a former student of the Bauhaus, the famous German art and architecture school.

The programme completed, I was assigned to the 4th Mobile Broadcasting Company whose captain was a former editor of a Redwood City paper, its first sergeant Joseph Wechsberg of The New Yorker fame, my fellow corporals Perkins, the Herald Tribune's music critic and Igor Cassini, the Hollywood gossip columnist, brother of Oleg Cassini, the dressmaker. We arrived in Britain at the height of the V1 and V2 attacks, which to my surprise frightened the liveliest and most bellicose among us almost out of their wits, while the slow ones like myself took it in our stride.

We camped for weeks in the rain-soaked royal park of Kettering, but before we could start our work, the campaign to push the German armies out of France was virtually completed, rendering our company's French section, to which I belonged, redundant. We were told that unless we managed to pull some strings and get transferred to some other duty, we would be doomed to continuous kitchen police and night-guard duty.

[...]

Our first task was to recruit more German-speaking economists. I went to Oxford and Cambridge for this purpose but succeeded in getting only three: Nicholas (later Lord) Kaldor, Kurt Mandelbaum (later Martin) and E.M. Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful, though he did not make himself small when interviewed by Major Colbert, whom he assured that "relations between the Schumacher family and the United States had been very cordial ever since [his] father's visiting professorship at Harvard". The two very able Austrian economists at the Oxford Institute of Statistics, Josef Steindl and Kurt Rotschild, decided against coming, because they did not want to visit their homeland in enemy uniforms.

Since we needed a few more economists, Burt Klein and I prepared a list of forty names and asked Major Colbert to fly to Washington to recruit eight to ten men from that list. To our dismay, he recruited all forty of them. Victory was near by that time, and the Washington economists must have had a bad conscience for spending the entire war sitting in Washington and grasped at the last chance of serving their country in uniform and seeing Europe into the bargain. Besides, Major Colbert, a true bureaucrat, seemed to have believed that the more people he recruited, the better our work would be, which may partly account for the giant size USSBS reached in the end. I took a gloomy view of that because, as a trained economist, I believed in the law of diminishing marginal productivity or, in plain English, that too many cooks spoil the broth.

A minor episode illustrates how our organization or, for all I know, our entire war machine was run. In the course of studying how the Germans organized their defense production, I learned that Funk's Ministry of Economics kept an inventory on Hollerith punch cards of all the machine tools owned and used by German industry. Since that inventory would have been invaluable for our purposes, I suggested to Major Colbert that he might get hold of an IBM-made Hollerith machine so that in case we got hold of those punch cards, we should be able to read them. He agreed and a week later told me that he had asked to have shipped to London not one but eight such machines and enough personnel to handle them.

Weeks after V-E Day I learned that the section of Funk's Ministry of Economics having those punch cards had been evacuated to Jena, a German town we were occupying at that time; but which, according to the Yalta Agreement, was to become part of the Russian zone. I rushed to Major Colbert, asking for a truck with which to bring those punch cards from Jena to our then headquarters in Bad Nauheim before we evacuated and handed over Jena to the Russians. He gave me instead an entire convoy of trucks, saying that for safety's sake I must bring back not only the punch cards but also all the machines and the German personnel handling them, because who knows if our machines and operators would be able to decipher them. I got to Jena 24 hours ahead of the Russians and the machine operators welcomed me as a saviour and begged me on their knees to take their families along as well, away from the much-feared Russians.

That was the only time I was the commanding officer of a whole convoy and am still proud that all went well. Soon thereafter, however, Major Colbert came for advice how to keep the eight American punch-card machines and their operators busy. I suggested that until other work came up, they might catalogue all the raids of the US Air Force. He was overflowing with gratitude for my saving him from embarrassment, but a few weeks later, when we had something more important to put on punch cards, I was told that it could not be done, because the catalogue of our raids was prepared in such (completely unnecessary) detail that it would take many weeks to complete.

But to return from overequipping to overmanning, that, besides its disadvantages, had at least one important and undoubted advantage. Immediately after V-E Day, we moved our headquarters from London to Bad Nauheim, near Frankfurt and then split into small groups, mounted jeeps and spent a fortnight scurrying all over Germany, tracking down the evacuated Berlin ministries and sniffing out the hiding places to which their heads and high officials deemed it prudent to withdraw. Thanks to our overwhelming numbers, we got hold of all the high officials worth interrogating from Albert Speer downward and all the statistics worth having. Our headquarters became an invaluable archive, and not only for us. Trevor Roper obtained all the data for his book on The Last Days of Hitler from us, as did the tiny British counterpart to our mammoth organization whose members did all their work and wrote all their reports as our guests.

Being on teams looking for people to interrogate and documents to seize provided plenty of events, excitement and surprises. My first team, however, with Ken Galbraith on one jeep, was uneventful, except for my fearing for my life when he insisted on relieving me, an experienced professional truck driver, from part of the driving, and for our always having to ask, not for one but for four or five billets to choose from, because Ken, a 6 foot 7 inch giant, could only sleep in beds with no footboard or one with slats where he could put his legs out between the slats.

Much more interesting was my later team that contained Kaldor, three NCOs and 2nd Lieutenant Straus, the only non-economist whose job was to get us billets and food. We started out with a 4-day stay in Salzburg, where we were billetted in an elegant villa kept in order by two maids. For our first meal, we had to separate, with Kaldor, Lt. Straus and I, who in the meantime had also become 2nd Lieutenant, going to the officers' mess and the NCOs having to go to the en-listed men's.

I resented being separated on that upstairs-downstairs basis, which was inconvenient as well, because we mostly had important business to discuss. So I asked Lt. Straus if he could arrange for us to have our future meals together so that we could discuss our plans and problems; he told me to leave that to him. Indeed, when we got home in the evening, the entrance hall was full of sacks, several of them containing many dozens of loaves of bread, cornflakes, potatoes, lettuce, and fruit; cans the size of large hatboxes containing beef stew, vegetables, soups, butter; not to mention innumerable other cans and boxes. I had never seen that much food anywhere before. Lt. Straus told me somewhat apologetically that the smallest quantity of food he could get from the army's supply office was two days' meals for a company-which meant 1,200 meals, 6 meals for 200 people.

The six of us stuffed ourselves for the three remaining days of our Salzburg stay, after which I left it to Lt. Straus to dispose as best he could of the mountain of food remaining. He gave the two overjoyed maids enough food to last them for at least a month, took the rest of it to the officers' mess; and we buckled down to being separated during meals for the remainder of our trip.

Driving on through Austria we soon came to our jackpot. As we were driving, I could see the railroad track in the distance, and a train standing on the open track, with a German soldier patrolling it. Through my binoculars I recognized his colonel's insignia and immediately stopped our jeep, feeling that a train guarded by a high-ranking officer must contain some VIPs. Indeed, it turned out to be the headquarters of the so-called Southern Redoubt, the southern part of Germany's armed forces, which our fast advance into Germany split into two. We found a dozen of the highest-ranking generals, with Karl Saur, Albert Speer's second-in-command, the only civilian. They were listening to the radio, surrounded by ashtrays brimful with cigarstubs, impatiently waiting for General Patton's staff to find and arrest them.

Kaldor and I found them before their arrest and interrogated them for two hours. They must have been terribly bored, waiting there for days after Germany's surrender; and visibly impressed by our knowledgeable questions, they went out of their way to give us important, relevant and, as we later checked, highly reliable answers. That was most useful from our point of view; yet I found it somewhat repellent that they should be quite so helpful to us who, after all, were their enemies.

Albert Speer, however, was our prime human target and Kaldor, excited by our accidentally finding Saur, Speer's second-in-command, persuaded Ken Galbraith, our boss in the Overall Economic Effects Division, to let him have a jeep for a week's search to find Speer. He managed to find out the name and address of Speer's ex-girlfriend whom he went to visit on V-E Day, but Kaldor arrived there days after Speer had left her for an unknown destination, leaving behind a small leather case. Kaldor took possession of the case, which was lined with green velvet and contained the hammer with which Hitler placed the first stone in building the Siegfried Line, the Nazi's equivalent of the French Maginot Line.

Speer was captured a few weeks later in Flensburg by Sergeant Fassberg, a less prestigious member of USSBS, who idly ambling through the streets of Flensburg found Speer's visiting card thumbtacked at the entrance of an apartment house. Kaldor, however, consoled himself with having captured an important memento of the war, which he kept on his desk and proudly showed off to all of us until he took it home as a present to his wife. Galbraith, however, spoiled his pleasure by announcing that such an important trophy must be surrendered to the War Department and would probably be exhibited in its museum.

What neither Kaldor nor Galbraith knew was that forgetful Captain Klein, having to affix a notice to the bulletin board, used Hitler's hammer to drive the nail but then forgot to put it back into its box on Kaldor's desk. Days later, when he remembered his omission, he could not find the hammer, so he went out to where the jeeps were parked, took a hammer from one of them and placed that into Hitler's velvet-lined box on Kaldor's desk, without anyone noticing the exchange.

Let me also mention another unexpected find. I was driving along an autobahn, when I came to its intersection with another autobahn where, in the middle of nowhere, far from any city or village, there was an enormously big building. I stopped the jeep to investigate and finding the entrance unlocked, entered a huge hall, choek-full of overturned, broken desks, chairs and at least a hundred filing cabinets, half-drowned in a sea of torn-up papers and documents, through which one had to wade knee-deep in order to get into other, equally big halls with the same contents. The upper floors contained hundreds of smallish identical bedrooms, each with a broken wash basin, apparently destroyed using a hatchet or pickaxe. There was not a soul anywhere, nor a piece of unbroken furniture and only a single attic room intact, a storage room, containing a whole library of beautiful, big, mostly French volumes of architectural pictures and drawings, some of which I recognized, because they were also in my parents' library.

I found out that the building, originally meant to be a vacation house for workers, housed Todt's evacuated Ministry of Construction, along with some of the foreign workers it employed in building the Siegfried Line. The architectural books I found were the personal library of Albert Speer, who had been Todt's successor in that Ministry and seemed to have left behind his library when appointed to head the Ministry of Armaments and War Production.

When Germany's capitulation was announced, the German officials fled, fearing the vengeance of the foreign workers, who celebrated Germany's defeat by tearing up their identity cards, the Ministry's files, and going on a rampage, destroying everything destructible. They must have been very badly treated if instead of rushing home to their families they took the time and effort to give vent to their bitterness by so thorough a destruction of what until then was their prison.

Less depressing episodes on that trip were a visit to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (Adlershorst) in Obersalzberg on top of a mountain and to Göring's personal train hidden in a tunnel, which a US officer discovered minutes before I arrived there. Göring's living room occupied an entire railway carriage and contained an extensive library full of German literature, an excellent collection of classical phonograph records and a chest with dozens of small drawers, containing beautiful and very fancy stationery, with each drawerful headed with a different one of Göring's innumerable functions and titles. I took a couple of each as mementos but soon used them all up for my own correspondence. His wife's car contained a bedroom in very ornate baroque style and a bathroom with a sunken tub.

The freight car on the train contained the paintings and other art objects Göring had pilfered from Jewish homes and occupied countries' museums. Those I saw only a few weeks later, when one of Patton's regiments exhibited them in a large villa on the Königsee. It was a huge collection of paintings of which I mainly remember the dozen or more paintings by Cranach, whose nudes must have been his favourite pictures.

War economies

As a result of Major Colbert's feverish recruiting, USSBS outgrew all of us.

People higher up in the Armed Forces hierarchy seem to have realized that so huge an organization needed more experienced and authoritative people to head and administer it than Major Colbert, a young corporation lawyer and our even younger, humbler and less experienced triumvirate. So his place was taken by a general and Mr. d'Olier, a high official of IBM, as its civilian head; our organization was split into half a dozen divisions each with a civilian VIP as its director, the most notable of whom were Kenneth Galbraith, former chief of the Office of Price Administration, later US Ambassador to India and Harvard professor; George Ball, later undersecretary of state under Kennedy's and Johnson's presidencies, and Paul Nitze, later chief US negotiator and several presidents' adviser on arms control matters.

An important advantage of acquiring those high-level civilian directors was their (and especially Galbraith's) willingness and ability to stand up against the Air Force's pressure to change our concluding judgment that our aerial attacks had not made an important contribution to shortening the war. A quarter of a century later, I found confirmation of that judgement from the best possible source when reading Albert Speer's voluminous but very interesting memoirs, written during his twenty years in prison. (Our own judgement, however, was not quite independent of Speer's, having been influenced by our interrogation of him.) For only on May 12, 1944, in the fifth year of the war and less than a year before its end in Europe, had the US Strategic Air Forces started the precision bombing of Germany's synthetic oil industry, which both we and Speer, the organizer of Germany's war production, considered the fatal blow to Germany's military might and prospects of winning the war.

With that many people, we completed our work by mid-summer. All that remained was to summarize the innumerable reports and memoranda into a set of final general surveys. At that stage, however, our whole enormous organization moved on to Japan, there to do a much shorter survey of the effects of our aerial attack in the Pacific theatre of operations. From Galbraith's Overall Economic Effects Division, only two of us, John Kendrick and I were excused from going to Japan and left behind in London with a couple of typists and the assembled documents, data and memoranda, to write the summary volume of The Effects of Strategic Bombing on the German War Economy. That was hard work but also enjoyable and restful thanks to the quiet atmosphere, which was a welcome change after the hullabaloo of our overcrowded and overstaffed headquarters in Bad Nauheim.

I shall not describe here our findings and conclusions, which have been published in many volumes and thousands of pages; however I do want to say something about one aspect of them, which seems very relevant today when all peaceful people expect the world's only superpower to defend them against the aggression of much weaker powers that compensate for their inferior power by ruthless disregard of treaties, agreements, international conventions and humanitarian principles.

I have in mind Hitler's spectacular early successes achieved with sur- prisingly modest military forces, thanks to his mastery of Blitzkrieg-lightning-fast, unrelenting, surprise attacks with all available planes, tanks and artillery massed against the barely defended border of unprepared and unsuspecting countries. He substituted surprise, speed and relentless advance for the overwhelming force required for prolonged war-a strategy that defeated not only Poland within a month but in another, later month France as well-after the phoney war of the 1939/40 winter lulled her into unpreparedness against so sudden and so unexpected an attack.

For, to quote one of my sentences from the book mentioned above, "the outstanding feature of the German war effort [was] the surprisingly low output of armaments in the first three years of the war... as measured not only by Germany's later achievement but also by the general expectations of the time and the level of production in Britain. In aircraft, trucks, tanks, self-propelled guns, and several other types of armaments, British production was greater than Germany's in 1940, 1941 and 1942."

Our first inkling of that was the discovery that unlike Britain's and our American defence industries, hardly any German factory worked a double, let alone a triple shift, because they had no shortage of machine tools, the most vulnerable economic targets of aerial attack. For one thing, the Germans were not on a total war footing in the first years of the war; for another, leaders of their machine-tool industry, believing in German victory, made preparations to capture the German-dominated European market for machine tools by building up their inventories in advance.

That is why the Germans could easily and quickly replace their machine tools when damaged or destroyed; when not, they could utilize the remaining ones more fully by adding a second shift. That explains why so few of our aerial attacks against economic targets had a noticeable effect on their war production. Nor did they suffer from a shortage of labour, because they could and did utilize slave labour from such occupied countries as Poland, Czechoslovakia and France; although they used it mainly for the construction work of the Todt Organization on the Sigfried Line and similar projects.

In short, the Germans, unlike we and the British, were never on a total war footing, except at the very end of the war, by which time it was far too late. Hitler was confident that the same limited forces, with the same Blitzkrieg tactics that so easily defeated Poland and France, would also subdue the Soviets and Britain. He felt so sure of ultimate total victory that he ordered a reduction in armament production in the autumn of 1941-an order which was rescinded and reversed, of course, by the end of that year, following the German defeat before Moscow and our entry into the war.

Indeed, the Germans were able to double their armament production between the beginning of 1942 and mid-1944, a striking indication of how far they were from total war preparation during the first three years of the war.

[...]

Joyless Economy

In 1965 I spent a sabbatical year as visiting professor at Harvard from where I did not return to Berkeley. I went to Paris for a two-year stint with the Development Centre of OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development).

Despite our drastically reduced income, we had a happy and full life in France, which strikingly confirmed my belief that the enjoyment of life had no less to do with consumption skills than with income. Much more difficult was to find the flaw in the tendency of economists to take for granted that consumers can be trusted to know best what is good for them and always to aim at achieving it-two assumptions on which our faith in income as a measure of welfare rested.

Once I began to question those assumptions, I realized that I myself did not know what made my life enjoyable and became anxious to find out. My amateurish readings of psychology textbooks, however, were of no avail. More promising and suggestive were a few snippets and obiter dicta I found in the lesser writings of such distinguished Cambridge economists as Marshall Keynes, Harrod and especially Hawtrey, all of whose ideas on the subject originated, as I later discovered, in the work of the classical Greek philosophers, mainly Plato, with whose works, thanks to the excellence of British public schools, all of them were much more familiar than I.

Then a psychologist from the Stanford Medical School drew my attention to the writings on motivation of a group of physiological psychologists; and some of those were a revelation to me. They anwered all my questions; fitted in with introspection into my own feelings and behaviour, and seemed to verify and provide a scientific explanation also for the remarkable insights of Plato and Hawtrey. I was thrilled to learn how well animal experiments and scientific research on the working of the central nervous system accorded with my own feelings and actions, and how well some of the data I was able to collect fitted in with the psychologists' findings.

All that proved so interesting and revelatory that in my enthusiasm I immediately started writing a book, amalgamating the psychologists' findings and my economist's thoughts and data, trying to present them in language accessible to economists and the general reader alike. That such a book would not contribute to economic theory nor change it in any way, was something I realized from the outset; but I had hoped that it would make economists more aware of our subject's limitations; and I also felt that a book whose writing gave me so much pleasure and self-knowledge ought to have the same effect also on the general reader. After all, the book dealt with such topics as the borderline between pain and pleasure, the role of novelty and danger in providing pleasure, the need of all living creatures for enjoyable stimulation, the question what activities are enjoyable when and why, the difference between skilled and unskilled stimulus enjoyment, the conflict between comfort and pleasure, and the relation between income and happiness.

All those seemed to be issues that ought to interest everybody who wants to enjoy life; and I had some confirmation of that, because quite a few of the my book's readers took the trouble of writing to let me know how much they enjoyed and learnt from it. Also, I was pleased to learn of its having been listed nineteen years later by the Times Literary Supplement among the hundred most influential books of the post World War II period.

Nevertheless, I now feel that publishing that book was a mistake, because I could have made it very much better. It explored the idea that for a full and satisfying life we must not only meet our bodily needs but must always have or find readily available some challenging activity to keep us from getting bored; and that the prerequisite for that was education.

For we learn early in life that food, drink, sleep, rest, clothing, shelter and sex satisfy our bodily needs; and we economists are probably right in assuming that most people know how best to satisfy those needs, given their means. Very different, however, from catering to bodily needs is the relief of boredom. Any one of innumerable physical and mental activities can relieve boredom, provided it is sufficiently challenging to one's physical or mental aptitudes to make it enjoyable. The challenge is to one's strength, skill or knowledge, which means that almost all those activities only become enjoyable and relieve boredom if one has learnt their particular skills or acquired some of their relevant knowledge beforehand.

Moreover, since different situations, different times of day, and different periods of one's life call for different activities to relieve boredom, one needs a broad and varied education in many skills and subjects to assure a full and satisfactory life.

That was the central theme of my Joyless Economy (1976). But just as with my first book, Welfare and Comptition (1951), when I discovered something new and important to say, I once again rushed into print before recognizing its full and much more important implications. For the book dealt with boredom and its relief only from the point of view of ordinary people, who work most ot their lives and earn their bread by the sweat of their brow or the strain of their brain. Boredom for them is a minor nuisance, a passing phase, relieving which eliminates occasional yawns and makes merely comfortable lives enjoyable and more interesting, but does no more than that.

I completely ignored the idle rich, the long-term unemployed, and the unemployables whose inadequate upbringing made them unfit for work; in short all those who have more leisure than they know what to do with and suffer from uninterrupted chronic boredom, a deprivation as serious as starvation, with equally fatal consequences. As hunger makes one look for food, so boredom makes one seek excitement, and just as people with no money for buying food stoop to thieving to avoid starvation, so those who lack the skills that can relieve boredom in a harmless way, will relieve it with violence or vandalism-the most exciting and so most enjoyable activities and the only ones that require no skill, only strength. Think of the mischief small children engage in when bored. Violence and vandalism are the adult equivalents of mischief.

Education, therefore, not only adds interest and variety to people's lives, it is also an essential and necessary condition of civilized society and the peaceful coexistence of its members. As I was writing my book, I suspected that I was on to something important; but resenting it the way I did, I failed to recognize and stress that much more important function of education, which was almost within my grasp.