Disunited Nations

The second-front question will probably be argued by historians for years. Last week millions who could not wait for the argument, thousands of Russians among the horrors of Stalingrad, seemed to be accusing the Churchill and Roosevelt Governments of outrageous lying on the subject.

The Argument. Basic facts in the argument were set forth in TIME, Aug. 10. The first of Russia's public appeals for a second front came from Maxim Litvinoff 14 months ago. Four months ago Winston Churchill got around to acknowledging the second-front agitation, saying that he welcomed the "militant, aggressive spirit . . . and the general desire to come to the closest grips with the enemy." Three months ago London and Washington announced that full understanding had been reached "with regard to the urgent tasks of creating a second front in Europe in 1942."

If this statement did not mean that a second front would be opened this year, the Russians and many others wanted to know precisely what it did mean.* The Russians had not learned that Anglo-Saxon utterances must be weighed with a delicate skepticism. They had been brought up to take what their Govern-ment said and like it.* Besides, the Russians, almost to a man, could see no arguments whatever against a second front. They were fighting a war in one country--their invaded own. There might be war in Britain, North Africa, China, the Pacific --to Russians deep in their awful present, the global war was an unreal alibi for inaction in Western Europe.

Last week anonymous authorities in London told a picked group of U.S. correspondents that in Moscow last month Winston Churchill and W. Averell Harriman informed Joseph Stalin that Britain and the U.S. could not attempt a second front this year. Stalin was said to have been given complete details of the situation as to men, arms and shipping, and to have still urged the action. Further, it was reported that at the time of the "urgent tasks" statement last June, the British-U.S. position had been the same; that Russian Foreign Commissar Molotov had known all about the reasons for it then, and after a conference of U.S. and British military men in London affirmed it.

Consequences. If all this was true, it meant that the statement had been rank propaganda, not only in the countries of its origin, but also in Russia, where the people were told by their Government that the Allies had guaranteed a second front. If all this was true, then the Churchill and Roosevelt Governments had once again mired themselves in ambiguities. The Rusian public, not told that it might have been fooled by its own propagandists, was evidently prepared to be furious at Britain and the U.S.

The Allies had tried to make such repairs as Winston Churchill's speech (TIME, Sept. 21), greatly praising Russia while belatedly confessing differences of opinion. But it was all a desolating object lesson in the difficulty of relations between Washington, London and Moscow. Almost anyone could agree with Banker-Statesman Thomas W. Lament, who wrote last week: "Russia has borne the heat and burden of the bloody battle on land. . . . Today death knocks at Russia's door. . . . The only possible tribute that we can pay her is to do everything in our power to relieve her agony. And it is by that course that we strengthen the resistance that will lessen the pressure on ourselves." This was simple logic. But so far the statesmen involved in London, Washington and Moscow had not even been able to develop mutual understanding and candor between their capitals and their peoples. If two long seasons of Russian suffering ended in tragic exhaustion and disillusion, with the Germans still solidly entrenched in Russia, it might seem highly logical to Joseph Stalin to cut his ties with the U.S. and Britain, and look to the immediate realities of his new position, including the probability that both Germany and Japan would be glad to settle on a bargain basis.* In such an event the Allied peoples would have to face the fact that Stalin makes Russian policy: the Russian people accede because they must and because they believe in Stalin.

Stalin has shown no emotional involvement in the British and U.S. cause. He has been highly secretive about Russian resources (whereas Britain and the U.S. have been willing to tell everything). While new sympathy has blazed through Britain and the U.S. for the heroic Russian people, the Kremlin has done little to stimulate Russian interest in the democracies and their aspirations. Save only in the matter of destroying Hitler--the supreme object of all the Allies--the democracies' aspirations are not, after all, the aspirations of the Kremlin.

So Stalin and the Russians may reason, if worse comes to worst. It was, in any event, a possibility which the people of the U.S. and Britain had to face. Some might turn their rage and frustration upon their own leaders. Some might allow inherent distrust of Communist Russia to outweigh (as it once outweighed) the fact that the U.S., Britain and Russia--until further notice--have a common interest and a common enemy. Some might even forget that Russia, without wavering, had reached an extreme hour of agony and an extreme hour of waiting for Allied aid.

* Reports claimed that the phrasing had originated in Washington, that Winston Churchill had telephoned Franklin Roosevelt with an idea as to clarification.

* In Soviet Russia, the Government cannot lie.

* A Japanese Army spokesman last week broadcast: "So long as the Soviet Union keeps strictly to the neutrality treaty signed between Japan and Russia, nothing untoward can happen in the north."

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