The question was not easy to answer. Russia, hard pressed at Sevastopol, wanted a second front in Europe to help ease the strain. The British Eighth Army, fighting to stave off disaster in Libya, required reinforcements. From China came calls for help, for Japanese columns were crawling closer to her vital communication points, cities. The great danger was that in attempting to answer all these calls, Britain and America might disperse their strength, dissipate their striking power.
The meeting between the executive chieftains of the two great English-speaking democracies was their third in ten months. From the first, the dramatic meeting at sea last August, came the Atlantic Charter.
SECOND CONCLAVE
The second Churchill-Roosevelt meeting was held in the White House last December and January. It sought to tighten the cooperation between England and her new ally, America. From it came a combined chiefs of staff group to plan joint military operations, committees for joint control of raw materials, munitions and shipping. On the groundwork it laid, combined boards for war production and food have since been erected.
Decisions on the problems of grand strategy reached at the third meeting are not likely to become known through joint statements from the two statesmen; they will be revealed in battle communiqués weeks, months from now.
BATTLE FOR EGYPT
The Nazis hammered at the gates of Egypt last week. Squat German tanks, guns firing, were roaring over the coastal plain. Part of the British Eighth Army was retiring eastward from Tobruk toward the border, eighty miles away. Behind, in battered Tobruk, General Neil Metheun Ritchie had left a garrison which may have to hold out, as another garrison did in the Summer months of last year, against protracted Axis siege.
Tobruk, many observers thought, was the key. If it were stormed and lost the road would be open for a Nazi attempt to drive eastward toward Suez, possibly beyond. Such a campaign, it has been believed, might coincide with an invasion by the Wehrmacht of the Caucasus, thus forming a giant pincers move which would envelop the Mediterranean, the entire Near East.
A THORN TO ROMMEL
Seven months have passed since British forces last November relieved the first siege of Tobruk. For seven months before that they had held the town, reduced to rubble, against repeated onslaughts. Tobruk last Summer became an Allied symbol of resistance. To Marshal Erwin Rommel, Axis commander, it was a thorn in his flank; it hindered a drive across the Egyptian frontier toward Suez.
The events leading up to the second encirclement of Tobruk followed the now familiar pattern of desert war. In the first move of Libya’s sixth campaign Marshal Rommel struck out three weeks ago to pierce a British defensive system strung southward through the desert from the coast forty miles west of Tobruk. The British met the onslaught with new tank units, including American-built “General Grants,” “General Lees” and the light “Honeys.” For nearly a week, the struggle swirled back and forth until the initial energies of both sides were exhausted. But the equipment of the Africa Corps of Marshal Rommel came through better than that of the desert armies of the British. The Germans renewed the fight.
Through a breach in the defense line, the Axis commanders manoeuvred their tanks in a series of encircling thrusts. One cleaned out, after a fiercely pressed siege, the Free French garrison of Bir Hacheim, southernmost anchor of the line. Others swept northward and eastward, curved toward the coast. British tank units south and east of Tobruk faced a trap. The Axis vanguard reached the coastal plain around the port just after most of the weakened British armies had withdrawn.
Realization of the crucial importance of holding her Mediterranean outposts prompted desperate actions by Britain’s Navy. Two convoys were sent out; one to Tobruk, the other to beleaguered Malta, one from Alexandria, the other from Gibraltar. Their coming roused the greatest sea-and-air action ever fought in the area. Germany and Italy sent waves of planes, scores of U-boats and strong squadrons of Italian battleships, cruisers and destroyers to intercept the ships. American Army planes participated in the action, were credited with badly mauling Italy’s sea strength. The convoys, London said, got through.
RUSSIA’S BLOODY YEAR
Today, on the last day of the first year of their campaign in Russia, the German armies are still fighting far short of the goal they set out to reach at dawn on June 22, 1941. Behind them lie the greatest victories and the severest setbacks ever to come to Hitler’s Wehrmacht. The Russians have estimated upward of 5,600,000 Germans killed, wounded and captured; Berlin four months ago admitted 1,500,000 casualties. In the initial five months of the year the German soldiers overran 500,000 square miles of territory with 42,500,000 people. In five months of Winter war they lost one-fifth of the conquered area to Russian counterattacks. The coming of Spring brought local battles on the southern front; a Russian offensive in the Ukraine, launched five weeks ago while the Wehrmacht was taking Kerch in the Crimea, forestalled, it was believed, the German plan for resumption of a major drive eastward toward the Caucasus and oil.
TERRIFIC TOLL
Soviet losses, in the first year of war, were likewise enormous. Six months ago, in an official estimate, Berlin claimed between 8,000,000 and 10,000,000 Red Army casualties; Moscow, more recently, has admitted close to 3,000,000 lost. Yet in those months of fighting Russian soldiers found a technique of resistance which, it appeared, blunted the Blitzkrieg and forced on the German Fuehrer an ever-lengthening war.
Last week the Soviet soldier’s power of resistance was again evident in two battles raging in South Russia. Sevastopol, the citadel on the southwestern coast of the Crimea, was still in Russian hands after more than seven months of siege. For more than two weeks the Germans had pitted tanks and guns and planes in an all-out attack against the city’s defenders ensconced in the limestone hills. Siege guns believed larger than the “Big Berthas” of the first World War had shelled Sevastopol’s defenses, which then had been attacked repeatedly by tanks and foot soldiers. The city’s people had lived out countless air raids in deep caves carved in the cliffs. “To the last soul” they had sworn “to die before surrendering.”
Before Kharkov a second German offensive launched eleven days ago appeared to have been halted along the Donets River. The Wehrmacht’s newest drive had been launched, so observers held, to eliminate Russian pressure on the Nazi flank and to prepare the ground for an all-out campaign across the Donets Basin, with its teeming industries, toward Rostov, gateway to the Caucasus. From there the Germans might swing south onto the oil-rich isthmus to meet Wehrmacht forces ferried across the narrow straits from Kerch, easternmost point of the Crimea.
AID FROM AMERICA
This was the threat faced by the Russian nation as the Red Army battled at Sevastopol and Kharkov. To help in staving off the danger direct aid was coming from the United States. American-made tanks and planes were on the Russian front; to these were added—the report came from Turkey, remains unconfirmed—bombers of the American Army Air Corps with American crews which had flown to participate in the defense of the Crimean bastion. From bases in the Middle East, moreover, four-motored United States “Liberators” had taken off for damaging raids on Nazi oil fields and supply dumps in Rumania. Yesterday Berlin reported that the Red Army, in a move to relieve German pressure in the south, had launched a counter-attack near Smolensk, on the central front.
JAPAN PRESSES ON
Over the far reaches of the Pacific and on the lands lapped by its northern and southwestern waters, Japan’s drive for conquest ground relentlessly onward last week. Her troops fought their way over the dusty hills and valleys of China’s Kiangsi Province. Her ships defied the shipwrecking williwaw of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands and poked their noses into fog-shrouded inlets. Southwest-ward over the sea there were indications that little naval skirmishes growing out of the great Midway Island battle that had set back Japan’s eastward drive were continuing here and there. Australia’s Darwin and Southeastern New Guinea’s Port Moresby were pounded relentlessly. At every point
Japanese objectives were the same: to capture bases from which Japan could be attacked, to obtain bases from which Japan can extend her conquests, to consolidate gains.
The heaviest Japanese thrust was made in China. There are Hangchow-Nanchang railroad which might help link occupied Malaya to Japan by a safe route going most of the way over land was the objective. At the beginning of last week the Chinese still held eighty of the 450 miles of the line. Powerful Japanese columns moving from the northeast and west closed on those eighty miles in a nutcracker movement that, after bloody street fighting, forced the Chinese out of towns, narrowed the Chinese-held area. The Chinese fought back grimly, struck at the rear and flanks of the advancing Japanese columns. From Chungking came grave warnings of the danger to China in the fighting, the value of the contested area to the Japanese; suggestions that America and Britain help the hard-pressed Chinese troops with an attack from the Pacific were made.
JUNE 22, 1942
Editorial
THE FALL OF TOBRUK
In the seven months that it stood last year, surrounded by Axis forces, and hurled back every assault, Tobruk became a symbol of courage and resistance. Its sudden fall, coupled with the almost simultaneous loss of Bardia and Bir el-Gobi, is a hard blow. The explanation of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s success repeats the weaknesses which have beset the British forces in Libya from the start. In tanks and guns Germany had both numerical and qualitative superiority. Her forces excelled in the rapid repair and servicing of mechanical equipment, in the blitzkrieg technique of using tanks, planes, and guns as an integrated assault team, and in resourcefulness of staff work and generalship. Above all, the British again suffered from the great handicap of the United Nations in having to spread their forces too thinly over too many places at the ends of long and perilous supply routes in order to meet an enemy free to strike outward from the center of the circle.
Presumably the Nazi campaign in Libya is a prelude to a full-scale assault upon Egypt in an effort to drive the British from the Mediterranean and conquer the entire Middle East. The drive may be viewed as one arm of an enormous pincer reaching toward the prize of Middle Eastern oil, the other arm being the German drive in Russia which has driven a wedge in the defenses of Sevastopol. This is a dangerous threat which must be occupying a major place in the discussions now going on between Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt.
The loss of Tobruk itself is not so important as the circumstances surrounding that loss. The Nazis claim to have captured 25,000 men and large stores of material, including supplies freshly brought in by the convoy which came through the battle in the Mediterranean. If this is true it must mean that Lieut. Gen. Neil M. Ritchie’s Eighth Army has been seriously weakened and that Marshal Rommel has been strengthened. He has helped to solve his own supply problem by capturing food and munitions transported at the cost of Allied ships and lives. Tobruk is not vital to the defense of Egypt, but Egypt is vital to the defense of the Middle East. The battle which now impends will be crucial. It must be won at all costs.
JUNE 26, 1942
Gen. Eisenhower Takes Up Headquarters in London
By CHARLES HURD
Special to The New York Times.
WASHINGTON, June 25—The United States today created in London the headquarters for a European theatre of operations for United States forces under command of Major Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, 51-year-old veteran of armored warfare. Announcement of his new post was made without elaboration, but among informed observers there was a unanimous feeling that the new office and its incumbent foreshadowed definite plans for the opening of a second front, based upon the British Isles, when circumstances and accumulation of men and arms gave promise of success in this venture.
It was understood on usually reliable authority that General Eisenhower, who arrived in London shortly before announcement of his new command, had left the United States after Prime Minister Winston Churchill had reached an agreement with President Roosevelt on the feasibility of planning for a second front, despite current setbacks in Libya and Egypt.
The second front, it is known, found receptive response in Mr. Roosevelt and was particularly urged by Maxim Litvinoff, Soviet Ambassador, as the surest means of relieving German pressure on the Soviet armies.
Additional significance was seen in the fact that the appointment was made public within a few days after the first official announcement that American troops were now in East Anglia, England, as well as on Irish soil, and encamped probably within thirty miles of the East Coast of the English Channel, now occupied by German soldiers.
General Eisenhower is considered generally to be one of the most brilliant among the younger crop of distinguished Army officers.
JUNE 30, 1942
Editorial
LIDICE, ILLINOIS
The suggestion was made in these columns on June 13 that some American town honor itself by taking the name of the Bohemian village which the Nazis announced on June 10 that they had “extinguished.” They had, indeed, done all that Nazis can do. They had murdered all the men, placed all the women in internment camps, sent all the children to Nazi “schools,” burned all the houses. They had done this because, as they charged, the men who eliminated Reinhard Heydrich had been sheltered in Lidice. They forgot that while a town may be physically destroyed and its people murdered, jailed or scattered it is utterly impossible to “extinguish” an idea by such methods. In its physical obliteration Lidice became immortal because it stood for three ideas that no free man can forget: first, for hospitality to fugitives who had cleansed the earth of a monster; second, for an unwavering courage and loyalty that permitted no person in the village to denounce another; third, for resistance to tyranny. Lidice, the little village, did more to keep alive the Freedom of Europe by being wiped out than the great city of Paris did, in 1940, by a surrender that kept its buildings intact.
It is, therefore, good to learn that the unincorporated Illinois town of Stern Park Gardens, near Joliet, has decided to adopt the honorable name of Lidice, in a ceremony to take place on July 12; and that funds are being collected to erect there a monument, with a flame burning perpetually “to symbolize the light of liberty which America is determined to preserve.” We need tanks, planes and guns. We need symbols, too.
Chapter 12
“RED VERDUN HOLDS”
July–September 1942
Two campaigns thousands of miles apart dominated the news in the summer and autumn of 1942. In the Pacific the U.S. Marine Corps opened the long campaign to wrest control of the string of Japanese-occupied islands with the landing on Guadalcanal in the Solomons on August 7. Deep in Russia, the German armed forces drove south and east toward the rich oil supplies of the Caucasus region and the city of Stalingrad on the Volga. While the German campaign was understood to be a critical one, its outcome was anything but certain. By late August the German Army had broken through to the Volga and in mid-September began a major offensive to take the city. “Red Verdun Holds” ran The Times headline, recalling the heroic defense in World War I of the French fortress. “If the Russians accomplish a miracle,” noted an editorial, “the event could mark the turning of the tide.”
The Soviet leaders were desperate for assistance and expected the Western Allies to open a second front somewhere in Western Europe to relieve the pressure on them. In July a Gallup Poll in America found that 48 percent of respondents wanted a second front at once, while 34 percent wanted to wait. In July Churchill and Roosevelt agreed that the best they could do was to plan a major operation in North Africa, postponing until at least 1943 any prospect of a major campaign. On August 19 a major raid was mounted on the French port of Dieppe, but the results were disastrous. It was evident that the Allies could not yet cross the Channel in force. Not surprisingly, The Times reported, “Moscow Is Bitter.” What the West could do was to bomb Germany to increase pressure on the German home front. In the summer of 1942 the first units of the U.S. Eighth Air Force arrived in Britain and
on August 17 conducted the first American operation against Rouen, in France. Throughout the year RAF Bomber Command conducted “area” bombing raids against the city centers of German industrial regions; these were designed to destroy civilian housing and kill civilian workers. The only ground fighting in Europe came from the Yugoslav resistance, divided between a national liberation army and Communist partisans, holding down valuable Axis divisions away from the Eastern Front.
The Times sent extra correspondents to the South Pacific to cover the start of the campaign to reverse the Japanese tide. The onset of what became the five-month Battle of Guadalcanal was a bloody engagement between the First Marine Division under Brig. General Alexander Vandegrift and the Japanese Seventeenth Army. The Marine Corps Raiders formed a tough, elite force to infiltrate Japanese lines. Troops were taught, The Times reported, “to gouge, strangle and knife.” Despite repeated suicidal frontal attacks by Japanese infantry, the Marine Division captured the airfield on Guadalcanal at Lunga and the Japanese-held port at Tulagi. “It’s Never Dull on Guadalcanal” ran The Times’s headline in September. “If the enemy is not attacking,” noted the report, “the Marines are.”
Elsewhere the Japanese enjoyed greater success. In China Japanese forces continued to consolidate their grip on the central and southern regions. The Japanese Army stopped short of invading India, but cut off the long supply route along the Burma Road, originally opened up to help the Chinese Army.
In India, a political crisis loomed as Gandhi and the Indian nationalists urged Britain to promise Indian independence, while Indian Muslims looked for a solution that would protect their religious interests. On August 8 the Indian government arrested twenty-one nationalist leaders. The Times devoted significant column space to the Indian question. British imperialism was regarded as an issue in the war alongside the military struggle for survival.
The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945 Page 71
