Monday, Jun. 16, 1941
War Between Two Worlds
"This war," wrote Benito Mussolini last week, "has now assumed the character of a war between two worlds."
The Totalitarian World was organizing. The German press scoffed at reports, originating in the U.S. press, that Adolf Hitler was about to announce a Federation of European States under German leadership. Such a federation was already virtually a fact, except for such nervous little islands of democracy as Sweden, Finland, Switzerland (which is useful to the Germans as a clearinghouse for foreign exchange). France was practically in the war against Great Britain (see p. 21). Portugal was strengthening the defenses of its Atlantic islands, and Lisbon was a nest of Nazi schemers working to have those defenses used against the Democratic World and not against Totalitaria.
That totalitarian Russia would become an active partner of totalitarian Germany seemed more likely than ever last week. What shady dickerings went on between Reichsfuehrer Hitler and newly designated Premier Stalin were secrets known only to the Kremlin and the Wilhelmstrasse, but rumors from Ankara of German troop concentrations in Rumania lent credence to a report by Correspondent John T. Whitaker that Hitler was forcing Stalin's hand. Possibly Joseph Stalin was waiting to see whether Britain could hold Suez before making a deal with Hitler in the Middle East, but it was disquieting news for the Democratic World that the British Ambassador to Russia, Sir Stafford Cripps, had information of such importance for his Government that he flew from Mos cow to Stockholm to deliver it in a neutral capital.
On Suez, too, perhaps depended the issue of war or peace for Japan, for the fall of Suez if the canal remained intact would bring the Mediterranean-bound Italian and French Fleets into the Indian Ocean. With peaceful expansion southward apparently blocked by The Netherlands East Indies (see p. 35), Japan must soon decide whether it can afford to risk expansion by war.
During the week German Ambassador Major General Eugen Ott and Italian Ambassador Mario Indelli both called on Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka. Mr. Matsuoka conferred with his chiefs of Military and Naval Affairs, while Emperor Hirohito received War Minister Eiki Tojo. A Government spokesman denied, as he must, a report that Ambassador Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura was seeking a neutrality pact in Washington (see p. 17).
The Democratic World was organizing too, although criticism, still free in such a world, made it look deceptively disorganized. Against the criticism of Winston Churchill's Government in Great Britain (see p. 29) could be balanced the growing unity of the Americas (see p. 36). But persistently, and for weeks, the U.S. has buzzed with peace talk.
That many a well-meaning, or ill-meaning, U.S. citizen was working for peace behind the scenes was too well known to bear denial. After Ambassador John Gilbert Winant had flown from London to Washington, the Axis radio began barking rumors that the British Government was considering peace. President Roosevelt denied it, laid the blame where it belonged (see p. 13).
In Tokyo, Ambassador Joseph Clark Grew made the week's clearest statement of the U.S. attitude toward peace. In a letter to pacifist U.S. church workers in Japan, he said: "I believe circumstances may arise when it may become necessary for us to get into the fighting in the interests not only of our own future safety . . . but precisely in order to insure the just peace and equitable world order which are among your fundamental desires. . . . The German Empire as now constituted is not satisfied with a just peace and equitable order. . . . One cannot temporize with cancer."
Waiting for Sumter. The U.S., in other words, was ready to fight. Adolf Hitler seemed to agree with his little partner in Rome that the war had become a war between two worlds. In LIFE last week appeared an interview with Hitler by onetime Ambassador to Belgium John Cudahy, in which, according to Cudahy, "he said the idea of a Western Hemisphere invasion was about as fantastic as an invasion of the moon. ... He said that he had never heard anybody in Germany say that the Mississippi River was a German frontier."* But this week Correspondent Cudahy returned to the U.S. with a sterner impression to give. Hitler, said Cudahy, "gave no impression that he wanted peace. . . . His attitude was a very unfriendly one--one of hostility toward me. He gave me the idea that he didn't like me at all because I was an American."
*Said Charles Augustus Lindbergh nine days before the Hitler interview was published: "If we say that out frontier lies on the Rhine, they can say theirs lies on the Mississippi."
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