The speakers would be cut back in: "Attention, Japanese forces remaining on hill crest. Japanese forces just behind us under command of Colonel Musashi surrendered last night and are now well taken care of. You are being given the same chance. Attention, I will soon come up the hill...."
A few more Japanese figures, small as ants on a sand dune, would come into sight on the hill and begin clambering down to the point of surrender.[44]
The period after 1945 has turned out to be considerably more turbulent than most Americans expected. Though the victory over Fascism and Japanese militarism has proved to be psychologically and historically complete, the struggles between the victors have developed such mistrust and bitterness as to create a present-day equivalent of the Thirty Years' War, rather than a period of peace as it was understood by educated men of the nineteenth century.
Along with many other military and political phenomena, psychological warfare has been thrust into a period of "no war and no peace" which has proved to be extraordinarily difficult for Western men to deal with either emotionally or intellectually.[45] Such phrases as Churchill's term, "the Iron Curtain," and Walter Lippmann's coinage, "the Cold War," have become a part of civilized speech throughout the world. They have obscured almost as much as they have explained. It is entirely conceivable that an adequate description of the present historical period will only be written after the forces now operating have ceased to be significant; at that future time it may be possible for serious and reflective men to determine what happened in the middle of the twentieth century.
=Recognition and Delay.= One of the preeminent factors in the psychological and opinion aspect of the turmoil in the mid-twentieth century has been the very sharp contrast between the _time_ on which a given event occurred, the _delay_ between the occurrence of the event and the final understanding of that event in their own terms by the strategic policy-makers affected, and the successful _recognition_ of the event in policy papers looking toward a further future. The political and strategic character of much recent military history has therefore been a grotesque comedy of errors--ridiculous if it were not so deadly serious--involving the lives of the major urban populations of the world.