THE WAR IN REVIEW
THE WAR IN REVIEW ALLIED armies stood this week on the threshold of tar-reaching decisions in the European conflict. Six hard-driving armies in the west had breached the Rhine defense line,...
...Reds See Longer War News of the successful crossing loosed a wave of optimism here at home equalling that which gripped the country last Summer when American troops were sweeping France clear of its German conquerors...
...In London the coming San Francisco conference was already the center of stormy debates...
...According to these reports the Kremlin is reckoning with a war lasting well into the Summer months...
...Events are moving rapidly...
...The Social Democrats, although they lost heavily, still controlled the largest bloc of votes —52...
...Churchill denied the charge and replied with a bitter attack on his accusers...
...Moscow went on record favoring Polish representation at the San Francisco Conference...
...In an order of the day, Montgomery told his troops that "the enemy in fact has been driven into a corner and he cannot escape...
...George S. Patton's battle-hardened 3rd Army hurdled the river and went, streaking into the German interior...
...Meanwhile, Tokyo was showing signs of extreme desperation...
...Although British sources frankly warned that Britain had interests in the Dardanelles, too, most of the criticism was directed not at the Soviet claim to the waterway to the Mediterranean, but at the Kremlin's insistence on taking what it wanted in almost arrogant disregard of the international machinery to which it pays such glowing lip service...
...The Nazi structure is being maintained, Jaederland wrote, by sheer terror...
...Left wing parties carried the election by a narrow margin, winning 103 out of 200 parliamentary seats...
...Poland, too, was in the news...
...Among major developments was the sudden, surprise move of the Kremlin in denouncing its friendship treaty with Turkey...
...Moscow reports indicated that the Russian high command is preparing for a longer war than the combined British and American staffs...
...Laborites led off with a stinging denunciation of the personnel chosen by Prime Minister Churchill to represent Britain, charging that he had deliberately discriminated against the Labor...
...Finland made interesting political news this week with its first nationwide election since its withdrawal from the war...
...The new Popular Democrat coalition, led by the Communists, obtained 51 seatSi There was considerable doubt that the two left wing factions could cooperate sufficiently to form a government...
...Millions of Germans would heave a sigh of relief on being liberated from Nazi rule, but terror of the Gestapo and concentration camps holds these elements in check just as stern discipline holds a great part of the German army that would otherwise long ago have been scattered," he reported...
...The representation would, of course, be from the Lublin government, which was sponsored and has had the backing of the Kremlin...
...Meanwhile, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden declared that the British delegation will carry to the conference a determination to fight "bullying" of small powers by the big nations...
...In the south Gen...
...The sweep of Allied victory and the imminence of the United Nations' San Francisco conference, now less than a month away, brought new political developments bubbling to the surface, emphasizing again how little has really been achieved in settling many of the basic international political problems...
...One of the most decisive factors in the length of the war, of course, will be the capacity of the Germans to continue organized resistance...
...The Soviets, it was obvious, were beginning a squeeze play for the Dardanelles and there was some speculation that they might even go to war to accomplish what they wanted...
...There is no possibility of doubt in this matter...
...Six hard-driving armies in the west had breached the Rhine defense line, Germany's historic barrier to invasion from the west...
...Stalin's move was particularly upsetting for the apologists of the Yalta Conference, who have been expressing the wishful notion that since the San Francisco meeting is to fall on the same date on which the Soviets could announce their aim to denounce the Russian-Japanese pact, Stalin would soon announce that the pact was not to be renewed...
...The most powerful blows across the fabled water barrier were struck on the extreme ends of the line...
...There were reports too that almost half of Tokyo's 7 million population had been evacuated...
...Complete and decisive .defeat of the Germans is certain...
...A first hand report of conditions within the Reich was given to the world this week in series of articles written by Christer Jaeder-land, Berlin correspondent of the Stockholm Tidningen, who recently returned from the bomb-shattered German capital...
...Desperation In Tokyo In the Pacific the clean-up of the Philippines and the devastation of enemy homeland cities continued at a furious pace...
...The Japanese fleet, which has been hiding in home waters since the Leyte campaign, was subjected to a daring attack by Vice Admiral Marc Mits-cher's rampaging Task Force 58...
...Premier Koiso, calling for new sweeping laws that would make the homeland a vast military camp, warned that Japan might soon become a battleground...
...The London Poles were also agitating for a place at the conference table...
...A more sober note was struck in eastern Europe, however, where the Red Army seemed to have launched its most powerful drive up the Danube Valley toward the Austrian capital of Vienna...
...Party...
...Instead, Stalin, without consulting either Great Britain or the United States, announced the termination of a pact with a country which has recently entered the war on the side of the Allies...
...Meanwhile, there were no signs that action has been taken to create a new democratic Polish government to-take the place of both the Lublin and London groups, as was provided for in the Yalta agreements...
...American and British forces under Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery crossed the river in the north in a drive aimed at enveloping the rich industrial region of the Ruhr...
Vol. 9 • April 1945 • No. 14
