Wairarapa Times-Age SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 1942. CHURCHILL IN AMERICA AGAIN.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 June 1942, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 1942. CHURCHILL IN AMERICA AGAIN.

POTH interest and expectation will be keyed to a high pitch by the news that Mr Churchill has once again crossed the Atlantic to confer with President Roosevelt. The British Prime Minister’s two preceding visits to the United States since the war began were both of them momentous. This one may be more momentous still. No premature revelations of course are to be expected, but it may be supposed that there was more than formal meaning in the statement of President Roosevelt’s secretary (Mr Early) to newspaper representatives summoned to the White House. The President and Mr Churchill, Mr Early said, would confer on “the war, the conduct of the war, and the winning of the war,” and he thought that major decisions would be reached.

A question that is uppermost in many minds was raised by newspaper men who asked whether the discussions of the two national leaders would deal with the establishment of a second front in Europe. Mr Early’s reply that this was quite a justifiable assumption was bland rather than illuminating, but the last thing to be expected of course is that any detail disclosure should be made of whatever major plans the Allies may be maturing.

There is a good deal, however, to encourage a belief that the Allies may be on the eve of taking action calculated to change speedily and decisively the ■whole course of the war. At the moment Russia, menaced still by immensely powerful German forces, is waging a grim struggle at Sebastopol and elsewhere, and the British and Allied .forces in Libya have suffered ■what can only be regarded as a heavy and serious setback. The conflict in the Pacific, meantime, in spite of the' damaging and weakening blows struck of late at the Japanese fleet, is at an indecisive stage.

Far as it is from being unimportant, what is unfavourable to the Allies in these circumstances is only one side of the picture. The" existing state of Hitlerite Germany appears to be summed up accurately as unbroken, but brittle. The German ■war machine is still immensely powerful and formidable, but those who control it have fallen far short of achieving their aims and their prospects of ultimate victory are tending at least to disappear.

It is upon the overwhelming military defeat of Germany that the United Nations must rest their hopes and the great immediate question is whether the inevitability of that defeat can be made manifest in Europe this year. Basing its remaining hopes on powerful action in selected war areas, of which Russia is chief, the Nazi dictatorship is already reduced to comparative passivity in other vital spheres, notably that of air warfare in Western Europe. At the same time, throughout the extensive areas of occupied Europe the Nazis are standing, as it were, on volcanic ground, where they are liable to be engulfed in fires of such massed hate as has never before been generated in human history.

In looking to the possibility of Allied action in Western Europe, additional to the heavily intensified air bombing which is already assured, it has to be considered that the Nazis are dependent on the occupied countries for an enormous volume of supplies, including large quantities of war manufactures, and that these countries constitute vita] links in the vast war transport organisation of the Axis Powers. It is by military action that Nazi Germany must be brought down, but her collapse when it comes, promises to be terrible.

Mr Churchill’s present visit to President Roosevelt tends to give colour to reports which have been current in the United States in recent; months that the United Nations will make the defeat of Germany the primary object of their joint strategy this year. In London, too, guarded expression has been given to a similar belief. Observing that the time when a second front in Europe would become practical must be left to the ITigh Command, a London staff correspondent of the “Christian Science Monitor” wrote last month : —

In any case, however, it is possible to state that whatever can be done will be clone on the basis of an assumption that by allout, unflagging; and co-ordinated effort of the United Nations Germany can be beaten this year.

Whether this expectation is or is not unduly optimistic, it may be taken for granted that affairs of great moment as they bear on the course of the war in the immediate future are now being discussed by President Roosevelt and Mr Churchill.