Lest We Fall

Thoughtful soldiers and officials in London and Washington last week had to turn their attention to a serious new war problem: the exuberant optimism now sweeping the Allied world and lessening the Allied war effort. For proof that the effort had lessened, the U.S. Army had only to look at the production figures, down in May, down again in June.

Because the Allies had established some of the conditions of victory, too many people assumed that all of the conditions of victory had been established, that the war was all but won. The facts, as they were seen by the men planning and executing Allied strategy, were different.

The Atlantic is, at least for the time being, almost an open road for Allied convoys. In his Guildhall speech last week, Winston Churchill said that U-boats recently had been massacred, and he pointed up the probable effects of that triumph on German morale. Malcolm MacDonald, Britain's High Commissioner to Canada, said in Ottawa that in a recent fortnight at least one submarine was destroyed every day. The German claims of sinkings in June were the lowest since the war began: 107,000 tons, down 800,000 tons from the 1943 high in March.

This news proved that the Allies had indeed won a spectacular and significant victory. But victory in the Atlantic is only a means to an end: Continental invasion. Opening the road does not crowd the road with the men and goods of war. That road, including the re-won Mediterranean link to the Middle East and to Russia, must still be protected by a big fraction of Allied air and naval strength. The Germans, in one of their several alibis to their own people last week, said that the U-boats were being partly withdrawn to await new devices and new tactics, that eventually they would strike again. Well aware that the Allies had won their recent gains at sea with new devices and tactics, Allied Navy men did not laugh off this threat.

The Mediterranean was a theater of great preparation and great Allied threat. It was also an area of growing Axis strength. This week the New York Times's well-informed analyst, Hanson W. Baldwin, reported that the Germans recently reversed an earlier decision to leave Italy and its southern islands to the Italians, and now have strong forces there. Winston Churchill said: "Very probably there will be heavy fighting in the Mediterranean and elsewhere before the leaves of autumn fall." Press accounts paid less attention to the words which immediately preceded that prediction:

"But I have some words of caution to say to our own people. First of all, great military risks are dominated by the risks and turns of the future. I know of no certainty in war, and that is particularly true of amphibious war. Therefore any mood of overconfidence should be severely repressed. . . . All large and amphibious operations, especially if they require the cooperation of two or more countries, require long months of organization, with refinements and complexities hitherto unknown. In war all impulses, impatient desires and sudden flashes of military instinct cannot hasten the course of events."

And the press gave even less heed to the Biblical text which Winston Churchill recommended to the Allied peoples:

"This is not a time," said he, "for us to indulge in sanguine predictions. Rather should we remind ourselves of St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians: Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall."

Dour realists in the British War Office and the U.S. War Department growled that Pantelleria was a lesson not only in the possibilities of air power, but in the enormous effort required to apply that, or any other, means of war. Sicily, they said, would take an effort many, many times that needed for Pantelleria. Italy and Germany would be a Sicilian campaign multiplied a thousand times.

Lieut. General Carl ("Tooey") Spaatz, U.S. commander of the Northwest African Air Force, last fortnight spelled out this fact and what it means, incidentally throwing much light on recent activities and immediate prospects in the Mediterranean. Air power, he said, has now proved that it can reduce any military obstacle. But, he also said, it can do so only if it is assembled in overpowering force: the Allies did not propose to apply it until they were certain that the force at hand was sufficient for the job. General George C. Marshall, in his sobering speech the same week (TIME, July 5), said plainly that the adopted strategy calls for the assembly of much more than air power; it calls for great land and naval forces to work with, and under, air power.

The Second Front. Behind this conception of massed effort, and the great effort necessary to prepare it, is a fundamental tenet of British and U.S. planning: no second front, in the Mediterranean or elsewhere, will be attempted until it is almost certain to succeed. The Russians may think this conception is over-timid and wrong. Others, like Airman de Seversky, think it overlooks opportunities to shorten the war by sharper, more imaginative strategy. But, for better or for worse, it is the adopted conception.

The Air offensive from Britain is speeding the day when the final effort will be certain of success. But the High Commands do not depend on air offensives. Neither the intensification of the air campaign nor the first sea-&-land steps toward Germany's inner fortress will mean that the basic conception has been altered or abandoned. In Ottawa, Commissioner MacDonald presumably had these facts in mind when he said:

"There might first be comparatively small attacks on Axis territory, which should not be regarded immediately as the opening of the second front."

The Pacific was a theater of Allied action last week, and it was offensive action. The fact that it could be undertaken, even on last week's preliminary scale, testified to growing Allied might. There, as in the Mediterranean, the most meaningful fact is that the Allies have the initiative. In the Pacific-Asian theater, it is a highly qualified initiative. Many Pacific islands--and Burma--still lie between the Allies and Japan, or between them and the bases from which Japan can be attacked.

So long as overoptimism slackened the U.S. war effort, the initiative could be a handicap.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.