Two-Thirds of the Ukraine

Philadelphia had fallen, Independence Hall and all. Industrial New England had been captured; Rhode Island with its naval base at Newport was isolated, though not invaded; the industrial areas of New Jersey and Pennsylvania were cut off from each other and threatened by a new enemy advance. New York and Boston were besieged. Columns were poised along the upper Potomac, threatening Washington. It looked as if the enemy might reach the Mississippi before winter.

This, with obvious geographical transpositions, was the Russian position early this week, after the new German burst in the Ukraine.

Kiev, cradle of Russia and capital of the Ukraine, a city decorated with bluffs, monuments and ancient legends, fell after withstanding encirclement and assault for four weeks. This city of 850,000 souls was the first of the major German objectives to go. But even more serious than the fall of the city itself was the destruction near it of vast amounts of materiel and the encirclement behind it of a large Russian force--250,000, the Germans said.

All of the industrial area of the central Ukraine was now lost to the Russians, and the invader pressed on for the vital Donets basin, where most of Russia's coal and much of its remaining industry lie. This push seemed to be developing in the familiar pattern: two prongs reaching out to encircle and squeeze. One hit for Kharkov, the Ukraine's second city. The other struck southeast along the coast to the Sea of Azov.

This southern arm cut off the Crimea, with its naval base at Sevastopol, from communication with the mainland. The Russians, far from giving the peninsula up--perhaps remembering that in the Crimean War 86 years ago Sevastopol resisted British and French siege for over eleven long months--rushed reinforcements by sea, prepared to make a bitter stand, as at Odessa and Leningrad.

The new Nazi plunge was alarming. It made Adolf Hitler's avowed aim of reaching the Volga by winter seem a possibility. If he did, it would not mean Russia's inevitable surrender any more than an invader's reaching the Mississippi would mean inevitable U.S. surrender. But it would mean that the easiest route for U.S. and British aid to Russia--via the Middle East and the Caucasus--was gone. Adolf Hitler would once again have succeeded in dividing his deadly enemies.

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