Struggle for Survival

TEN YEARS FROM Now a divided, stunned and defeated U.S. may be trying to adjust itself to a Communist-ruled world.

TEN YEARS FROM Now a weary, mangled and victorious U.S. may be trying to salvage what it can from the radioactive wreckage of the world.

TEN YEARS FROM Now a busy, peaceful U.S. may be helping to push forward the frontiers of freedom everywhere in the world.

The problem for Americans is how to make the second alternative more likely than the first, and the third more likely than the second. Almost certainly, in those ten years, some Americans will die fighting --perhaps a few score, possibly millions. Almost certainly, billions of dollars will be poured out. There will be no safe course--only choices between dangerous courses.

That is the shape of the next ten years--a shape which every decent man wishes were different. It will not be changed by wishing.

The Girl, the Bishop & the Bomb. This decade of struggle for the survival of freedom might or might not include a war between the U.S. and Russia. Even if there is no war, the struggle will be more "total" than World War II. The stakes are bigger, the danger is greater, the battlefronts are broader. Not all the weapons are military. Last week, for instance, brought two stories (one about a girl in Prague and the other about a bishop in Sarajevo) which illustrated a force more important to the security of the U.S. than possession of the atomic bomb.

The girl (name unknown) was attending a meeting of students at Prague's Charles University. A Communist organizer asked the students to express their political opinions. The girl rose and defied him: "The time when debates in this country do any good has passed," she snapped. Her fellow students cheered. Then the Communist tried to get the students to make nominations to one of his "action committees." He turned down as "unreliable" several names suggested. The girl rose again. She asked: "If you are going to select the candidates, why ask us to elect someone?" That broke up the meeting.

The bishop, Varnava Nastich, was born 36 years ago in Gary (Ind.). In the nine years he lived there before going to Serbia, whence his parents had come, he breathed in the spirit of freedom along with Gary's stench and soot. In Serbia, Nastich worked against Tito's Communists and was brought to trial despite his position in the Orthodox Church, which the Communists cuddle. Here is part of his interrogation by three half-literate Montenegrin judges:

Q. What do you have to say?

A. All your accusations are inventions and false. I tell you, I am not afraid. You may kill me, but that is not important. The Serbian people are against you and all the civilized world despises you. You have already lost the war.

(The courtroom cheered the prisoner.) Q. You are reported to have said that the regime in Yugoslavia is atheistic, that violence and crime have the upper hand and there is urgent need for action to remove the tyranny. Did you speak in this manner?

A. Yes, and more than that. I have spoken what all the people are speaking, feeling and desiring.

Q. Do you believe that Americans will come to overthrow the present regime?

A. I believe that quite positively. And I know that our people will meet the Americans with cheers as a liberating army.

Q. Did you speak to the farmers that they will be better off when the Americans come?

A. In substance I did say that to them. And the same I say to you here and now.

In a long question the bishop was charged with being in contact with anti-Tito Chetniks in the hills of Praca and Rogatica.

A. Not a word will I say about those brave men in the free hills who are ready every moment to lay down their lives for their ideals and those of their people.

(The approving uproar was so great that the judges ordered the courtroom cleared.)

The prosecutor produced a letter, purportedly written by the bishop, in which it was stated that 1,300,000 Serbs had become innocent victims of the hammer & sickle.

Q. Did you write this letter, and do you think this statement is true?

A. With my own hand I wrote it. The only thing that might be incorrect in that statement is the number of victims. For, since I wrote that letter, you have killed very many more people. Therefore, I say, only the number might be incorrect.

In the end the bishop's legs were manacled, and, clanking his new chains, he was taken off to eleven years of labor in the prison ironworks of Zenica.

Thousands of Decisions. Millions in Europe and Asia have the beliefs and the courage of the girl in Prague, the bishop in Sarajevo. If their faith is stamped out, not all the uranium that will ever be mined can replace it.

It is a fact that such faith and courage can be stamped out. Mikolajczyk was a brave man, but the Communists chased him from Poland. Benes, who stood up to Hitler, was a brave man, but the Communists broke him. Petkoff was a brave man, but they shot him. If the Communist terror machine keeps rolling over Europe and Asia, erasing faith in freedom, the Reds will be strong enough to fight a war with the U.S.; they may be strong enough to win it. If the Communists should get control of Europe and China and hold them, they might beat the U.S., Bomb or no Bomb.

At present, however, freedom is very much alive in Europe, still nickering in China. Despite some hysterical yips from Washington in the past month, the U.S. is by no means sunk. If it continues the positive line exemplified last week by the brilliant announcement on Trieste (see FOREIGN NEWS), the U.S. has a better than even chance of preventing World War III.

That task will involve thousands of American decisions. Some of them were made last week, some will be made next month, others in the years to come. The key decisions will mean nothing unless the American people understand them and participate in them. They can't do that unless they know the strategic situation in which they are placed. Some serious misconceptions about that situation are floating around the U.S.

A Bloodless Battle. One misconception is a tendency to confuse the Russians with democracy's late enemies, the Germans and the Japanese. Both the Axis nations were militarist, which means that they had a preference for going to war to get what they wanted. Militarism is not one of the numerous moral spirochetes in the Communist mind. The Reds understand very clearly the importance of military power, but they prefer not to use it if they can reach their objectives by propaganda, conspiracy or blackmail. The Communists are not likely to unify the U.S. with a military Pearl Harbor.

Japanese and German racism was almost impossible to export. Communist ideology is easy to export; in fact, it makes more sense in a lot of other countries than it does in Russia. Because of that, the struggle with Russia will be more in the economic, political and ideological fields than was the struggle with the Axis.

Every one of these nonmilitary fights has, however, a military meaning. If the U.S. loses enough of them, it will get into a military position which the Communist states can push over without much risk to themselves.

No shots are being fired in the present Battle of Italy; but if the Communists win Italy in a free election, that will have an effect equal to the fall of Singapore and Manila in World War II. It would take years and billions of dollars and thousands of lives to retrieve the loss of Italy.

Pietro Nenni, a Socialist trimmer who supports the Communists because he thinks they are going to win, does not talk to Italians about war. He talks about better living standards. Yet if enough Italians follow Nenni, Communism will win the Middle East--and military men think the Middle East would be the most important theater in a war between Russia and the U.S. It would make a lot of difference which side controls that area in a war.

Not long ago some U.S. strategic thinkers were talking about a World War III fought across the polar icecap. Their idea was probably premature. A transpolar war in the next decade is unlikely for two reasons: 1) equipment for it is not being developed fast enough; 2) some of

Russia's main strategic centers are in the south.

The Area That Counts. Even if Western Europe can be kept out of Communist hands (and that is a bold assumption), Red control of Italy would mean that Russian air and submarine power would be able to dispute U.S. access to North Africa, Turkey, Syria (see map). These are precisely the areas which the U.S. would need to mount an air attack on Russia if war came. Deeper bases in Saudi Arabia, the Sudan and Kenya would be menaced from a Communist Italy.

Middle East oil, essential as it is to a U.S. war effort, is second in importance to the strategic position of the Middle East countries.

Most of these critical areas are inhabited by Arabs, militarily not a formidable people. Yet they have shown the British, the French, the Turks and the Germans that they are capable of serious and persistent harassing operations--precisely the kind of warfare which would make bases in the Arab world costly and precarious if the Arabs were inflamed against the U.S.

That is why the U.S. reversed itself on the partition of Palestine. If the U.S. had decided to spend the next few years killing Arabs, control of an area vital to the U.S. would have been jeopardized. Nothing less than such a danger to national security would have made a career politician like Harry Truman throw away his chance of New York's 47 electoral votes, as he did when he infuriated thousands of Jews by last week's decision against Palestine partition.

Unless the U.S. has access to the Middle East, Russia is free from vital threats and able to move in Europe or Asia as it wishes. Admiral A. T. Mahan wrote 48 years ago:

"Russia is working geographically, to the southward in Asia by both flanks, her center covered by the mountains of Afghanistan and the deserts of eastern Turkestan and Mongolia. ... It is upon and from the flanks that restraint, if needed, must come. . . ."

Since Mahan's day, the military destruction of Germany and Japan, the decline of British power and the rise of Communism make restraint upon Russia's flanks a far tougher problem.

Russia's slow-motion economy cannot support a scale of war nearly equal to that of the U.S. in World War II. But the Red Army, by moving west only a few hundred miles from its present position, could engulf Western Germany, the world's greatest potential war production center outside the U.S.

A Russian airborne move east to Alaska is not regarded as impossible by U.S. military men. Russian air bases in Alaska would bring Detroit within easy range. Even without Alaska, the present Russian position in the Kurils and Sakhalin brings much of the U.S., including the atomic plant at Hanford, within range of "oneway" bombing attacks.

On the eastern flank, Moscow's agents, the Chinese Communists, have almost realized the Russian historic strategic objective, Manchuria and the coasts of China. If Japan, cut off from a Communist Asian mainland, had to serve as the main U.S. base in the East, the support of the Japanese population would force a heavy drain on U.S. shipping and resources.

A Communist China would hold the Indian subcontinent's 385,000,000 in a pincers, overhang the South China Sea, from whose opposite shores come 80% of the U.S. natural rubber.

In addition to the immediate threats to Italy and China, the Communists have well-developed civil wars under way in Indo-China and Greece. They may take advantage of confusion in The Netherlands Indies and India. Their strong minority parties in France and Germany could become majorities if the people of those countries became convinced that the Communists will ultimately win the world struggle.

Besides their political assets, the Russians are now making about 70% of the world's airplanes (U.S. 14%). They have B-29s, and their jet planes are not only more numerous but faster than U.S. types. Russia is, suddenly, a sea power. It has 250 submarines, mostly of the long-range and high-speed type, developed late in World War II, and copied from captured German models. How many men, ships and planes would it cost to keep sea lanes open for war materials and military supplies in World War III?

The View from Paris. So the struggle for survival will not be easy. The U.S. will need the Middle East and Western Europe, at least, to stay ahead.

How is the U.S. doing in Western Europe? TIME last week asked a sagacious Frenchman to give his opinion. He said:

"The majority of Frenchmen believe the U.S. to be stronger than Soviet Russia, and that a cool and lucid manipulation of that superior force is the most effective way of stopping war.

"Frenchmen do not think that America manipulates her superior force with either coolness or lucidity. They think she tends to veer from lack of self-confidence to hysterical action. And they think she is inconsistent with herself, her friends, and those who would like to be her friends.

"The U.S. has two main defense positions in Europe. The ultimate, the rock-bottom defense position, is contained within the triangle Scapa Flow-Trondheim-Calais, backed against Great Britain.

Even if 250 Russian divisions overran the western continent in ten days, U.S. air and naval superiority operating from this triangle would make Stalin's occupation of Western Europe a more uncertain and tenuous military asset than Hitler's.

"The second main defense position, which is preferable to the first--especially preferable to Frenchmen, Belgians, Dutch and Italians--is behind a line roughly drawn where the Iron Curtain now falls.

"The danger point in this position at the moment is Italy. It is inconceivable that the U.S. should admit the possibility of the Communists taking over Italy. 'Yes,' Americans say, 'but suppose the Italians vote Communist? Suppose they freely choose Communism? How can we interfere then without refuting the very principles of democracy which we are proposing to defend?'

"The correct thing to do is to tell the Italians that they can choose almost any party they like, but not Communism. The U.S. should make it clear now that it will use force, if necessary, to prevent Italy from going Communist. What a howl would go up! But Italy, a great country, is a nation we have just defeated. We had to fight Italy because she was politically so decadent or so immature or so irresponsible as to accept a Fascist regime which, beside being antidemocratic, constituted a menace to other nations. There is no reason to allow her to choose another regime at least as anti-democratic and dangerous to others as Mussolini's."

Very Serious? "It is fine for Truman to utter warnings. It is sensible to build up the armed forces. But Frenchmen, Belgians and Dutch cannot understand why, if the situation is 'very, very serious,' as

Secretary Marshall affirms, America does not act accordingly.

"They do not understand why the U.S. contents itself with giving moral backing to the five-power western European military pact. Either America intends to stop Russia from dominating Western Europe, or she does not. If she does, she ought to give full and formal military backing to the five-nations pact at Brussels. She ought to make arrangements for standardization of equipment, for the maintenance of airfields, for the establishment of a joint staff and command.

"So long as America does not do these things, she allows Frenchmen and Belgians to wonder if, after all, they would really be defended, or if they would have coldly to comfort themselves with the promise of another liberation."

The U.S., in short, has to make treaties promising protection to Western Europe and Italy against Communist domination, no matter how that conies about. It has to be ready to use force to back its promise.

The same kind of sense-making talk came last week from an American who had been in Czechoslovakia while the Communists were kidnaping it. He wanted to know why Washington simply wrings its hands over the crisis. There are plenty of things to do. The Reds did not seize Czechoslovakia but of sheer nastiness. They had a purpose. Ever since the Corminform was set up last September, Czech Communists have been proposing a Five-Year Plan that would change Czechoslovakia's whole economy, build up its heavy industry and make it the armament workshop of the Communist states of Eastern Europe. The Communists grabbed the government in Prague because Czech resistance to this plan was growing. The U.S. cannot now undo the Red grab, but it can do a lot to thwart the coup's purpose. Some items mentioned by the U.S. traveler:

1) The U.S. and Britain can cut off Czech imports of industrial raw materials through the Western zones of Germany.

2) It can embargo shipments of machinery from the West. (At present nine U.S.-made mechanical carloaders, presented to the Czechs by UNRRA, are loading uranium ore for Russia at Joachimsthal.)

3) It can cut off food imports, especially fish and eggs from the Low Countries.

These measures would be hard on innocent Czechs. But more countries will yield to Red pressure unless the U.S. makes it clear that to do so will mean suffering. If enough countries go Communist, war will follow and the U.S. will have to drop bombs on its friends in Warsaw, Prague and Dresden, just as it dropped bombs on France and Holland in World War II.

Last week brought another triumph for the Communist nonmilitary pressure which is undermining the U.S. military position. The Polish Socialist Party gave up the last shred of its independence to the Communists. After asking some Polish Socialists why they gave in, TIME'S Warsaw correspondent cabled:

"They go to the Communists because of a strange moral disease. Exhaustion describes it better than fear. When they try to work with the Communists, men of action and principle are frustrated at every turn. They are figuratively tortured, not by excruciating pain, but by the drop, drop, drop of the water method. They cannot seem to resist the prospect of relaxation which goes with bowing to the convictions of the strong. They who have bargained away authority stumble as if magnetized toward the holders of power. It is like freezing to death. There comes a time when it is too hard to struggle, much too tempting to lie back and let come what will, and then destruction almost seems a pleasant relief."

This is an accurate description of what coalition with the Communists means. Not until this month did the U.S. Government make a firm, open statement warning against such coalitions.

To the leaders and the nations who want to commit suicide by yielding to Communist pressure, the U.S. needs to bring not only life and help, but counterpressure.

Where the Guilt Will Be. The nations attacked by the Axis in World War II bear a share of the guilt for the slaughter. They could have stopped it--almost bloodlessly--by stopping Hitler in 1933, in 1936, perhaps even in 1938. They could have stopped Japan in 1931.

The U.S. and its friends have the power to stop World War III. If they don't, they will be guilty, along with the aggressor, ten years from now.

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