Anniversary of a Hope

The Marines landed. Out of the shallow invasion boats and through the surf thousands of them scrambled to establish beachheads on key points in the Solomon Islands. For the first time the U.S. had seized the offensive on the battlefield (see p. 20).

North all the watery miles to Alaska the Navy made a sudden smashing raid on the Jap-held Aleutian island of Kiska.

Only a few days before the Army's Lieut. General John Lesesne DeWitt, Chief of the Western Defense Command, had conferred at Sitka with the Navy's Commander A. J. Isbell--and the photograph, suddenly appearing out of the Navy's rigid Alaskan censorship, had been the only clue to an Alaskan action.

The two attacks were synchronized to strike the Japs at both ends of the Pacific at the same time. The U.S. could take heart: perhaps the dreary days on the defensive in the Pacific were coming to an end--perhaps they would soon end in the Atlantic, too.

Anniversary. It was high time. The attacks came as the Atlantic Charter reached its first anniversary--fittingly, its "paper anniversary." If the U.S. could take and hold the initiative, the war might be ended before the Charter's wooden (fifth) anniversary.

After a year the Charter was still all on paper.

The world still remembered how the charter was born in the fog-wreathed North Atlantic, where H.M.S. Prince of Wales and the trim, grey, bow-flared U.S.S. Augusta tossed at anchor, where the President of the U.S. and the Prime Minister of Great Britain conferred, sang at ship services, conferred again.

Home to the war went oak-hearted Winston Churchill, his dark blue Trinity House uniform damp with the spindrift of the high sea, his yachtsman's cap askew. Home to a nation which still believed it could avoid the war went broad-shouldered Franklin Roosevelt, faultlessly pressed, confident, characteristically hopeful of the world's destiny. They had kindled--so they hoped and perhaps believed--a fire that would be a light to all men.

Yet this week the meeting was more remembered than the charter. Acrid H. G. Wells had called it "an ambiguous document, full of holes and escape clauses." An American cynic had called it the great est public document since the Republican Party platform of 1936. The simple fact was that the Atlantic Charter had kindled no fires. Most of the fires that had raged in the world in the twelvemonth were made by the enemies of the U.S. and Great Britain.

Broken Strategy. The cynics were unfair. The Atlantic Charter was a nobly conceived document. Its failure was that it had not yet been implemented, a year later, by the specific words, the specific deeds, that would make its words shake the world.

Whatever Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill planned before they parted--a sanguine global strategy to win the war by Lend-Lease, a campaign to have the democracies fight a holding action until the weight of U.S. war production overwhelmed the Axis--whatever exactly they planned, one thing was certain: they had not planned the war to go as it has gone. Their reckoning did not provide for Pearl Harbor, for the fall of Singapore and The Netherlands East Indies, for a submarine blockade of the East Coast of the U.S., for the Jap moving into the

Aleutians. Somewhere the plans went powerfully astray.

Last week the U.S., far from serving as democracy's arsenal while its allies held, was fighting delaying actions everywhere except in the Solomon Islands. The rosy optimism, the pipe dreams of bloodless victory, were gone.

The Decisive Year. The war effort was going badly enough so that Washington, which had sugar-coated its news, now let Information Director Elmer Davis tell its citizens the bitter truth. Reported sense-making Mr. Davis:

Burgeoning shipbuilding statistics had become almost meaningless: sinkings were so high that not until 1943 could the U.S. possibly have as many merchant ships as before Pearl Harbor. War production had taken a down turn in June: combat planes, tanks, artillery and subchaser deliveries were all behind schedule.

Said Elmer Davis: "We are deep in what may be the decisive year of the war. . . . We could lose this war. We have never lost a war; but it has been remarked that this means only that our ancestors never lost a war; and our ancestors were never up against a war like this. To win a total war we must fight it totally, and we are not yet fighting it that hard. Many individual Americans have made great sacrifices, but as a nation we are not yet more than ankle deep in the war."

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