Time Will Not Wait

The Russians and the Germans, in these July days of 1942, are fighting the battle that may decide the world's fate.

On the plains beside the Don the battle has only begun. Already it is erupting and spreading along the vast Russian front. No Russian loss or retreat in any one sector will be a final loss. But if the Germans win this battle--and in the Don sector they were still winning this week--the war will be indefinitely lengthened; the 1939-42 phase of it will be definitely lost. The U.S. and Great Britain, invading Hitler's Europe and fighting him on his own fronts, will then have an infinitely harder task than Hitler had in Russia. And it will be a task that they must take on while in the Far East Japan is still winning, and growing stronger, and becoming as hard to defeat in her area of conquest as Hitler will be in his--if Russia falls.

The Time is Now. Moscow knows this, and Moscow's voice changed its tone this week. Its cry was still the same: that the U.S. and Great Britain must open a second front in Europe, and open it soon. Not only the tone, but the words were different; and the differences reflected the mounting urgency of Russia's need and peril.

Now was no time for the diplomatic niceties and strategic reticences which blunted the first announcements after Molotov visited Eden and Roosevelt (TIME, June 22). Last week Moscow's spokesmen did what none had done before: they said flatly that the U.S. and Great Britain had decided "to open a second front in Europe in 1942." Commissars in the field with the Red Army quoted this unqualified declaration to the troops--and Moscow let its allies know that the Red Army had heard of the promise. Russia in her hour of peril had given the promise of hope to her troops, of warning to London and Washington, that there could be no turning back.

Cried a Moscow broadcaster, significantly speaking in English: "Time waits for no man. Time was a good ally to the anti-Hitlerite coalition during a whole year, a year in which Britain was able to accumulate her forces and the U.S. to develop further their industries and build their Army and multiply their Air Forces. Now time will not wait while the peoples of Europe are waiting,* and waiting impatiently, for aid and for the signal to act . . . ."

Fear for the First. Some London and Washington correspondents last week warned the United Nations not to expect a second front very soon. These dispatches may have been no better than many a bad guess from those capitals. But they were no comfort to Moscow. Perhaps the U.S. and Britain were not yet ready, but many a non-Russian who remembered Spain felt that the only unforgivable and irreparable failure would be the failure to try.

Said the English-language Moscow News, as though arguing a case before a doubtful jury: "Hitler's back is his weakest spot--he should be struck there with all the might at our disposal." Famed Russian Correspondent Ilya Ehrenburg cabled to the London Evening Standard: "In his recent speech Churchill said that it was the Crimean campaign that helped to save Malta from the continuation of mass bombing. All our men have read this by now. . . . It is timely to tell our Allies of the scale of fighting and of the seriousness of the situation. Let every reader of these lines draw his own conclusions."

But the specter haunting Russia this week was not primarily the failure of the U.S. and Britain to open a second front. It was the first front-- Russia's own front--that roused the specter of fear, and turned Russia's gaze to the valley of the Don.

*Last week the new Office of War Information issued its first pamphlet: a detailed, bits-&-pieces account of underground resistance to Hitler in France, the Lowlands and the Balkans, by thousands of nameless patriots and by some known to the world, such as the Serbs' Mihailovich. Said Director Elmer Davis, summing up the message of The Unconquered Peoples: "When the time comes to create a second front it will be effectively supported as a front of liberation."

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