Five Years of War

"We lack food and medical supplies. Warsaw is lying in ruins. The Germans are murdering the wounded in the hospitals. They are driving women and children before their tanks as screens. Our sons are dying. The help that has come from Great Britain is insufficient. Hear us --Holy Father, Vicar of Christ."

This despairing cry of a nation in agony, slicing through the international joy over the liberation of Paris, was radioed last week to Pope Pius XII in the name of the women of Warsaw.

In Warsaw, as in Paris, the underground had risen prematurely. But in Paris the U.S. and French forces had arrived in the nick of time to save the patriots. In Warsaw, no rescue had come to the underground forces of General Bors, which for a month had stood off the German Army. RAF flyers in Italy had made the 1,750-mile round trip to drop supplies and a few weapons (TIME, Aug. 28). So far the Russians, some ten miles away, had dropped nothing.

On Aug. 23, 1939, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Viacheslav Molotov had signed the Russian-German pact in Moscow. Twelve hours after its ratification on Aug. 31, Hitler gave the signal that sent the German armored divisions rumbling across the frontier against the Polish cavalry, the Luftwaffe against the all but defenseless Polish cities. Thus, on the fifth anniversary of World War II, the war was back where it started.

It was an anniversary exultant with victory, jubilant with the hope that the war was nearing its end as the Allies harried the Germans through France, the Russians smashed through the Galati Gap and Hitler's Balkan outworks began to crumble. It was also a moment for glancing at the war's score.

And yet, last week, while delirious Frenchmen danced and kissed, Germans stared stolidly into blackness and even Britons wondered. For as the war's fifth birthday came round, the British, like the Germans, were tired. Buzz-bombs were worse than the blitz. And Britons worried over the look of the world to come. For Poland, even victory would mean a national tragedy. For France, it was a vast questionmark. Ever since the blitz failed the British had known that victory would one day be theirs, as the Germans after Stalingrad and North Africa had glimpsed the spectre of defeat. And they knew something else--at once comforting and alarming.

Deep down, Britons and Germans sensed that they would never again collide over the domination of Europe. Five years of war had left only two giants in the world's arena. The future lay between Russia and the U.S.

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