Over the past two weeks, The Tactical Notebook has serialized a contemporary translation of a trio of articles written by Georg Wetzell in 1939. In preparing the text for this series, I did a bit of ‘light editing’, most of which involved commas, paragraph breaks, and capitalization. Apart from this, I presented the work of the translator, Fred W. Merton, of the Translation Section of the US Army War College, as I found it.
True to his calling, Technical Sergeant Merton erred on the side of fidelity. As a result, some of the paragraphs he produced present difficulties to Anglophone readers. In particular, the passage of Actual War and the Military Commander of the Future about cooperation between soldiers and statesmen resists quick comprehension.