CRITICAL EIGHTY DAYS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXII, Issue 265, 8 October 1942, Page 4

CRITICAL EIGHTY DAYS

In July the British Minister for Production (Mr Oliver Lyttelton) named the forthcoming eighty days as the most decisive in history. Subsequently he again spoke on the same subject, when he said in the succeeding sixty days "we shall see a terrible increase in the

intensity of the struggle." The period Mr Lyttelton named has expired, and it has been a highly critical one in every theatre of war. In Russia the Germans have pressed on to the Caucasus as Russian bastions have fallen before their onslaught, but the great prize of the Grozny oil wells is not within their grasp as the Soviet army bars their progress. In the Volga the Nazis have failed to win Stalingrad, yet _ there have been times when its fall seemed but a matter of hours. Street by street, factory by factory, hill by hill the Russians have successfully fought to keep their enemy from winning the decisive victory of the 1942 offensive. In September Mr Lyttelton believed that a successful Russian resistance at the gates of Stalingrad had to continue for only a few more weeks and the tide would have turned in our favour. Those weeks of successful resistance are passing and Stalingrad still .stands, and there is now good reason to believe it will endure the Nazi assaults. It will be a great victory for Stalin if it does and a great defeat for Hitler, for Marshal Timoshenko's armies will have been saved from destruction and control of the Volga will not be in Hitler's hands. In the Pacific theatre the period has been most critical, but there is a better outlook, both in New Guinea and in the Solomons, and New Zealand watches with the keenest interest the progress being made. As a London writer says, these have been momentous days and we have scpu the first momentum of the United Nations to- take the initiative.