THE WAR IN REVIEW
THE WAR IN REVIEW EXTREMELY optimistic communiques from Moscow seemed this week to indicate that the military-stalemate prevailing on the European fronts for the past fortnight or more had been...
...In the ports they have taken there exist great potentialities for additional shipbuilding facilities...
...The industrial plants everywhere in those regions have been put in first-class working order...
...Rice shops opened by the government were forced to close again because of the scarcity of rice...
...In India his task was further complicated by the unrest and bitter resentment aroused by the apparent inability of the British Viceroy, Viscount Wavell, to check the terrible famine sweeping the Indian province of Bengal...
...America's Role Revealed Meanwhile, Americans had opportunity to gain an insight this week into what role is being planned for them in the big push against the fortress of Europe...
...Describing the progress of the campaign, Alexander was not overly optimistic...
...Asserting that America's role in the war had thus far been confined to supplying materials, Smuts declared that "in the assault upon Hitler's Europe next year the United States undoubtedly will take a leading part—perhaps the leading part...
...They will use the 300,000,000 native inhabitants to develop these raw materials...
...The editorial, although hinting broadly that a second front was the primary concern to Russia, predicted that the meeting would shatter Hitler's plans for a long war by uniting the three powers militarily, politically, and economically...
...Belated government efforts to check the famine, it is said, have been ineffective...
...Reports from that area this week brought scant hope that an invading force would find the native populations united for a drive against the Germans...
...Mountbatten was back in India this week from a conference with Chinese leaders in Chungking, where it is said that plans for the drive into Burma were discussed...
...Considerable comment was created by the cheerful editorial note sounded by War And The Working Class, official Soviet publication...
...This remark was generally interpreted as meaning that an invasion of the Balkans might be launched soon...
...Sir Harold Alexander, commander of Anglo-American ground forces in the Mediterranean theater, asserted that the Italian campaign had tied up between 35 and 40 German divisions in Italy and the Balkans, robbing the enemy of reserves that would otherwise have been available for the Russian front...
...At mid-week the Reds were reported to be smashing ahead in an effort to cut the Nazi escape corridor at the bulge of the Dnieper and trap a vast German force in what Moscow hoped would become "another Stalingrad...
...THE WAR IN REVIEW EXTREMELY optimistic communiques from Moscow seemed this week to indicate that the military-stalemate prevailing on the European fronts for the past fortnight or more had been broken by the decisive fighting in the Ukraine...
...Alexander Replies To Red Star In urging the necessity of a second front immediately, one of the Moscow papers, Red Star, official organ of the Red Army, declared that the main forces of Britain and the United States had not yet joined the battle and that the Italian campaign was diverting no German strength from the eastern front...
...Melitopol, hailed as the gateway to the Crimea, had fallen, to be followed soon afterwards by Dnepropetrovsk, the great power city...
...Reports from New Delhi told of the thousands of Indians dying from starvation and diseases brought on by malnutrition...
...Grew Warns Against Optimism While the Japanese were consolidating their positions in Burma and driving northward into China, this week Marshal Smuts, in the same address referred to above, offered as his opinion that Japan would fall suddenly after Germany has been defeated...
...Black markets demanding exorbitant prices for small amounts of rice flourish, and looting is widespread...
...We face a long, hard war with Japan, even after we have turned our full attention to it, he warned...
...His view was corroborated by Gen...
...Dwight Eisenhower this week when the Allied commander declared that "It will be a long, long way to final victory, over a bitter, rough road...
...Famine Sweeps Bengal Meanwhile, the problems of the war in the Orient loomed larger each day...
...Moscow Exploits Good News What effect, if any, the military developments were having on the course of the tri-partite conference could not be judged...
...The Japanese," he said, "today occupy tremendous areas which contain every raw material needed by any country for national power...
...Shortly after Smuts had expressed this typically British view of the enormous job facing the Allies in the Pacific, America's former Ambassador to Japan, Joseph C. Grew, drew from his long experience in the Orient to warn against such wishful thinking...
...Smuts also made reference to fighting in "southeastern Europe" this year...
...Speaking in London, Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts, Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, predicted that the big attack would come in 1944 and would be lead by the Americans...
...It is not going as "quickly as I'd like," he told newsmen, and added: "It's always a hard fight against the Germans...
...Replying to these charges, Gen...
...Other Moscow papers, exploiting fully the good news from the front, urged greater Anglo-American participation in the war against Germany, pointing out that the defeats in the Ukraine were indicative of how quickly Germany could be crushed if full scale offensives were pressed from both the east and west...
...In Yugoslavia and Greece, ae* cording to dispatches from neutral countries, nationalist groups were engaged in bitter warfare with each other and were devoting as much effort to fighting their own countrymen as they were the Germans...
...The prolonged and intensive drain on the British Commonwealth, he said, made it necessary to look to American manpower as the "strategic reserves in the West for the final moves in the war...
...How well they timed this new campaign for the second front could be judged by the almost immediate response in London...
...There were no official reports on what was transpiring behind the locked doors at Moscow...
...The breezy predictions of the armchair strategists that a major offensive blow against Burma was underway were badly shattered as it became apparent that Lord Louis Mountbatten, newly appointed commander in Southeastern Asia, was still in the preliminary stages of mapping his strategy...
...The rush of good news from that Allied sector was tempered, however, by the clear indication that German opposition has stiffened in Italy and that modest Allied gains are being achieved there only after prolonged effort...
...Several London papers took up the cry for more intensified action against Germany and called for drastic changes in the British and American conduct of the war...
...Berlin communiques confirmed the gravity of the Nazi position in the south and told of desperate measures being taken to check the Red advance...
...Although the more than usual cheerfulness of the Russian dispatches was undoubtedly calculated to strengthen the bargaining power of the Russian delegation to the three-power conference in the Kremlin, there was little reason to doubt that the Red Army was gouging out vital gains in the Ukraine and along the shores of the Sea of Azov...
Vol. 7 • November 1943 • No. 44
