GREAT BRITAIN: Our Deepest Fear

Britons of all political complexions, tensely watching the grim news from Russia, read a London Evening Standard editorial that put their hopes into plangent words. Author was the Standard’s crusading young Editor Michael Foot, 27, whose book, Guilty Men, caused an uproar in Britain just after Dunkirk. Excerpts:

Our deepest fear is that the Russian armies should be destroyed; that they should be encircled, trapped or minced to pieces by superior steel. No wild imagining is needed to assess the results. Hitler could return westward with countless legions, unnumbered machines, could devote all his energies to settling his accounts with this island. He would have riches to gamble and weapons to squander. This conclusion we dare not in our senses contemplate.

Have we the men [to open a Second Front]? We have more than the number who saved Moscow last autumn, more perhaps than the number whom Timoshenko commands. Have we the machines? We have Matildas and Valentines, and Timoshenko fights with them. We have two-pounders to equal the German 37-mm. We have six-pounders to surpass their 50-mm. We have new tanks designed for the close country of Flanders and France. We have mastery of the air.

Have we the ships? Aye, there’s the rub. Well, we had ships to take 950,000 men to the Middle East, ships to capture Madagascar, ships to take huge convoys to India, ships to transport supplies to Russia, ships to save an army from Dunkirk, ships to keep this nation the best fed in Europe. Ships do not lie idle. They must be employed according to a rigid rule of priority. Suppose the Second Front became Number 1 priority. Perhaps then the greatest seafaring nation the world has ever seen would be unable to find the ships.

Have we the will? “No more Dunkirks” is the cry and it sounds plausible.

But suppose the Russians worked on this maxim. No more Kievs; no more Odessas; no more Sevastopols. Is this the Doctrine of Victory or are these epics reserved for Russians?*

* In the U.S., where public opinion is no less eager to get on with the war than in Britain, there has been less general clamor for a second front, more disposition to leave the decision as to time and place to military men. But last week the St. Louis Star-Times, in a front-page editorial was hard-hitting as Michael Foot’s, came out for a second front— now or never.”