understood 332.und.003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

I understood that we were in a very serious situation, that, as a matter of fact, we were being strategically surprised; that on the battlefields and on the fronts, Syria and the Sinai, [there was] a very small part of the regular army, maybe a tenth of the army; and mobilizing the reserve service and for it to reach the borders, would take at least 24 or 48 hours... for them to only begin reaching the borders... and that the situation was very serious, and that the regular army would have to stand before enormous forces attacking it. And I understood that it was a very, very serious situation, and it would be very difficult to manage. I never thought we'd be caught off-guard like that, because the very strongly-held assumption was that we would be alerted of the war at least 48 hours in advance, and now we were being alerted [but] it would not allow us to bring our reserve service to the front before the war broke out.