Week of Climax

The world and its war shuddered last week in the pangs of a climacteric. Everywhere there was a sense of impending change, an uneasiness.

The nations trembled before a climax in Russia (see col. 3). They witnessed a terror in France (see p. 24). They got a new campaign in Iran (see below). As had been the case at every period of imminence, misleading rumors lit up the hot countries, like sheet lightning which has no real bolt: Was the Dnieper Dam blown up? Were the Germans making armored sleighs for winter warfare in Russia? Or was the report merely a trick to lull the London-Washington Axis? Did the Americans intend to concentrate bombers against Japan at Vladivostok? Leaders spoke: Franklin Roosevelt talked a good war (see p. 12), and Winston Churchill declared the U.S. in (see p. 21).

All this suggested a turning point. The change which might be, which so much of the world wanted, was this: that the war, every step of which had up till now been chosen by Adolf Hitler, might no longer be his war; that it might now become the property of those who had been pushed around for so long.

Hitler was full of haste last week. He wanted to crush the Russians at once. If he did not, if the war dragged into the winter, he might no longer be the chooser of campaigns. He was an old hand at breaking promises, but there was one promise--made, not to statesmen of the so-called plutocracies, but to his own people--that he did not want to break, for his power could break with it. He made it on the last day of 1940: "The year 1941 will bring consummation of the greatest victory in our history."

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