Council of War

For the sixth time, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill held council.

What decisions they reached were military secrets, but the questions they needed to find answers for were no secret. First came problems of basic military strategy:

> How do the Allies enter Europe? By Italy? and how soon? (See p. 26.) Or shall the Allied armies strike more directly instead through Norway, Denmark, France?

> How soon, and how heavily, shall the Allies strike Japan? The war against Japan probably must be started with a Burma campaign, to get help soon to China's land armies. The monsoon rains end in October. Are the British and Americans prepared--and willing--to move then?

The rapid march of events had raised new problems of what is possible with the means at hand.

But questions of political strategy inevitably overshadowed questions of military strategy, for two major questions as yet unsettled were clamoring for answers: ^ What policy, toward men and institutions, will the United Nations take into Europe? This question jumped out at Franklin Roosevelt the morning after Mussolini fell--when Franklin Roosevelt had not come to an agreement with himself and with Winston Churchill about their political attitude toward conquered Italy.

The question of Italy will rise again. The question of their attitude toward Germany, toward every one of the Axis satellite nations, may arise at any moment with equal unexpectedness. To prevent blunders, Roosevelt and Churchill need to know their answers in advance.

> How do the U.S. and Britain propose to live with Russia? Joseph Stalin has attended no Roosevelt-Churchill conferences. His absence this time was painfully emphasized last week by a dispatch from the official Russian news agency Tass stating he had not been invited. (Actually Stalin was informed the moment the conference was scheduled: in diplomatic usage an invitation is never extended unless it is certain to be accepted.)

Compared to having a policy toward a conquered enemy, the problem of having a policy toward a victorious ally is more important and more difficult. The depths of misunderstanding between Russia and the Allies are still cavernous.

Stalin, with lingering suspicions of the capitalist democracies and a bitter knowledge of the horror that war has brought to Russian soil, distrusts the U.S.-British policy of heavy bombing, believing that it is aimed at saving lives rather than crushing the enemy. Victory in his eyes calls for an immediate, all-out second front, regardless of casualties.

From the U.S. and British standpoint, casualties alone do not win a war and the point is to win. They know more about Axis military and industrial strength than they do about secretive Russia's. They cannot get the use of Russian air bases for bombing raids like the one on the Ploesti oilfield--which could have been made from Russian soil with a shorter flight and heavier bomb loads.

They do not know what help, if any, Russia will ever be willing to give against Japan, and they noted suspiciously Russian press attacks on Chiang Kai-shek's anti-Communist policies last week. They naturally cannot yet see eye to eye with Russia on postwar plans for Germany and Eastern Europe.

Unless victory, in the long run, means about the same thing to Russia that it does to the U.S. and Britain, World War II may never be completely won--nor over. The two statesmen meeting this week had to face this final hard knot of United Nations diplomacy.

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