"We Are Losing the War"

The problem was still the same old problem. The enemy, dispersed across the world, pinned down the Allies on too many fronts. Unhappily--and unavoidably, the High Commands seemed to think--the only solution was still the one that had solved nothing yet. The Allies, dispersing their forces to meet the enemy wherever he was, in essence let the Axis General Staffs determine the grand strategy of the war. Lieut. General Brehon B, Somervell of the U.S. Army brutally stated the consequences last week. Said he: "We are losing the war."

The fronts where the enemy had to be met were growing:

> Field Marshal Rommel's rested, reinforced Afrika Korps seemed about to launch the drive for Egypt, Suez and mastery of the Mediterranean.

> The Germans, pressing through Egypt and the Caucasus, had compelled Britain and the U.S. to begin, hurriedly and late, the building of a preventive army in Iraq and Persia under General Sir Henry Maitland ("Jumbo") Wilson (TIME, Aug. 31). The British already had some forces there, but the sudden appointment of General Wilson and the feverish reinforcement were evidence that, in effect, a new army was being created for a new front.

> The British and a few Americans, beset in India, grew tense at indications that the Japanese invasion forces in Burma awaited only the end of the monsoon rains this month.

> Adolf Hitler, on the war's third anniversary, hinted that Japan would soon attack Russia. In How War Came, published last week, Reporters Forrest Davis and Ernest K. Lindley report that in the Tripartite Pact Japan promised Germany to attack Siberia when the German Army reached the Volga.

> The U.S., driving a tiny dent into Japan's Pacific wall, now had to find the men, the ships and the planes to breach the wall.

Dispersed Concentration? The week's portents were not all bad for the Allies:

> London stirred with rumors that Churchill was about to reorganize his command system. Was the up-&-down hero of Libya and Ethiopia, General Sir Archibald Wavell, to be Churchill's military right bower? No one knew. Churchill had never really warmed to Wavell--at least until recently. But Sir Henry Maitland Wilson was Wavell's favorite; the separation of Sir Henry's command from that of General Alexander in Egypt and Syria had long been General Wavell's idea. London expected to hear more of Wavell, and of his plans for close Anglo-American contact with the Russians.

> The High Commands were at least informed, and were certainly thinking, about the possibilities of real air concentration against Germany.

> If there had to be dispersal, only dispersal-in-strength could beat the enemy on his fronts. The U.S. Navy and Marines in the Pacific had found enough ships, men and planes to overwhelm the thinly extended Japs in the Solomons. MacArthur and his Australians were ready with enough troops to set back, perhaps defeat, the Japs in New Guinea. Even the Chinese, supported by a small U.S. air force, had concentrated enough power to take full advantage of Jap withdrawals in Chekiang and Kiangsi. Plainly the Japs were suffering more from their dispersals than the Allies suffered at the points of specific action last week.

> The R.A.F. bombed Sicily. The Italians said that a small British naval force actually landed on the islet of Anticythera, between Greece and Crete, then apparently withdrew. Of greater importance was the fact that the British were feeling--perhaps too late--for the initiative along the watchful, waiting shores of the Mediterranean.

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