QUIET CONFIDENCE OF

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIII, Issue 46, 24 February 1942, Page 4

QUIET CONFIDENCE OF

STALIN

Promises and predictions about war are seldom reliable. They were unreliable in Malaya and in various other places. But M. Stalin is a man so sparing in words and in promises that his prediction that the Germans will be cleared out of half a dozen Russian districts at a "not far distant" hour deserves more than passing attention. He promises that the Red Army will drive the Germans from the approaches to Leningrad, from White Russia, from the Ukraine, and from the former Baltic States—Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. The Red Army will also drive the Germans and Rumanians from the Crimea, and the Germans and Finns from Karelia. If these predictions are realised at an hour not far distant, or even within the next twelve months, a fundamental displacement in war values will result. Hitler will not only give ground on a wholesale scale; he will also lose his greatest asset, his victory reputation. If ( Stalin accomplishes only one-half of his programme in the next twelve months, the legend of the German army's invincibility will be gone for ever. The best conscript army in Europe will lower its colours to a better conscript army. This would not prove that democracies will be able to continue doing little or nothing for their own defence, as the Western democracies have done during the last two decades. It would merely prove that the Germans can be outdone in total war by a people thai is prepared to pay the price.