World Battlefronts, STRATEGY: All One Front

Klieg lights played on the pink marble head of Lenin, brooding in the great hall of the Kremlin; on the thousand heads in mid-Asian skullcaps, scarves and army caps; on the calm, mute face of Stalin; on the discreet face of Sir Archibald John Kerr Clark Kerr, Britain’s Ambassador to the U.S.S.R.; and on Molotov, crying to the members of the Supreme Soviet:

“The Anglo-Soviet and the Soviet-American communiqués declare that ‘complete understanding was reached with regard to the urgent tasks of creating a second front in Europe in 1942.’ This statement is of great importance to the Soviet Union, since the creation of a second front in Europe will create insuperable difficulties for Hitler on our front.”

Message & Reminder. These were almost the words that Russia wanted to hear from Molotov, back from London and Washington with his agreements for war and post-war collaboration (TIME, June 22). They were not quite a final declaration that he had been promised a second front this year. But, in their whole context, they were an unequivocal statement that Russia now expects her Allies to open a second front—in Europe, in 1942. In this sense, they were a reminder to Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt (see p. 13).

For the decisions which would answer Molotov, the world had to wait. But Churchill’s sudden visit to the U.S., Molotov’s grave words and the graver threat to Russia (see p. 21), all the crowding crises of last week hammered home a fact so simple that it was hard to grasp. In World War II there are no separate fronts. There are only sectors of one world-belting front. Mr. Molotov’s cry for a fresh sector in Europe had to be balanced against cries from Chungking (see p. 25); against the threat looming from the Aleutians (see p. 24) that Japan might soon menace both the U.S. and Russia with a new Siberian sector; against, above all, the renewed peril to Egypt and Suez (see col. 3).

Fateful Effects. Never before had North Africa seemed so near and so vital. From Cairo to Washington and London went a momentous memorandum, listing the danger to Britain’s last hold on the Mediterranean: the fateful effects if Germany, by finally winning North Africa, achieves a junction with the Japanese and cuts the chief supply line from the U.S. to Russia and the U.S. Army’s air-ferry lines to India and China. It recited the enormous value of the Allies’ North African bases, within air reach of the Middle East, Russia and southern Europe (where a European sector could be opened by sea-and-air action across the Mediterranean).

The dispatches did not precisely identify the source of this document, but they made it clear that U.S. military men in Cairo approved its main conclusions: 1) the British forces now in Egypt, with all their U.S. planes, tanks and guns, cannot hold Suez and North Africa; 2) only a U.S. expeditionary force can prevent a disaster which, at this stage of the war, might be worse than the defeat of France.

The press was guessing when it portrayed Winston Churchill arriving in the U.S. with the plea: “Save Suez!” But Churchill has got a clear record of insistence that North Africa is vital, that it is a hub of the Allied war scheme. Still, with the probability of a vast German attack on Russia, and existence of a major Japanese attempt to crush China, danger to the United Nations loomed on every sector of the battlefront. And nowhere had there yet been signs of an offensive to endanger the Axis. All the signs pointed to a summer of bad news for the Allies.