Mr. Penrose, who was wartime economic advisor to Ambassador Winant, "seeks to determine how it was that, notwithstanding the warnings that might have been taken from the First World War, and the time, the energy, and the resources that were given to postwar planning, economic disaster came early in Germany and was narrowly averted in 1947 and 1948 in the rest of Europe." Briefly, his thesis is that the principal error was a faulty sense of proportion in the planning.