NOTES ON THE WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 114, 10 November 1943, Page 4

NOTES ON THE WAR

HOW LONG?

CONFLICT IN EUROPE

Amid the sweeping successes of the Red Army across the Dnieper, and the steady advance of the Allies in Italy, and the devastating air raids on Germany's industrial centres, . one passage in Mr. Churchill's Mansion House speech, reported today, will come as a salutary shock to the superoptimist betting on an early collapse of Germany.

A great many people in Europe, said Mr. Churchill, talked as if the end of the war were near. He hoped, indeed, they might be proved right. ...

They would, however, be foolish and blameworthy if they allowed their plans of action to be based on the prospects of an early collapse in Germany. . . . The campaign of 1944 in Europe would be the most severe and, for the Western Allies the most costly in lives, of any they had yet fought, and they must all brace themselves and strain every nerve for successful accomplishment. Mr. Churchill added that the climax might be expected next year. Hitler still had 400 divisions under his control in Europe. Churchill's Attitude. • While no doubt Mr. Churchill's main purpose was to dispel the wishful thinking that blithely expects the war to end this year or withp six months, there is much, more behind his solemn warning of harder days to come. His motto has always been, while hoping for the best, to prepare for the worst, and in his three' and a half years of office he has seldom been far wrong. His military mind foresaw at the outset after Dunkirk the immensity of the task, and; while much has occurred that he could not possibly have foreseen, his plans never envisaged an early offensive against Hitler's Germany from the west on the Atlantic coast of Europe. In fact, 1944 was about the earliest date of which he gave an inkling. The "autumn leaves" passage of an earlier speech, foreboding an invasion of Europe by the Allies this northern autumn, could quite fairly have referred to the invasion of Italy, which, after all, is part of Europe, if not, in Stalin's opinion, quite the "second front" the Russians have long wanted and expected. But 1943 so far has gone very much according to the Churchill plan, a twelve-month uninterrupted success. Why the Warning? Why then does Mr. Churchill," surveying the present scene of war in Europe, anticipate a still severer campaign for the western Allies? It is