Thursday, January 11, 1940

MORE RUSSIAN SETBACKS IN FINLAND. Last week’s issue of Time magazine made it sound as if the Russians were finally making headway on Finland’s Karelian front, throwing a “nerve-breaking” artillery bombardment at Finnish troops and positioning 100,000 of Stalin’s best soldiers for a frontal attack on the Finns’ third largest city, Viipuri. But an article in Wednesday’s New York Herald Tribune says that the Russians are “fighting for their lives” in other sectors.

One Soviet division, the 44th, has been smashed by Finnish defenders east of Suomussalmi and is now limping back across the Russian border, according to the Herald Tribune. Another Russian force advanced on the north central city of Salla in an attempt to knife towards Sweden, cutting Finland in two at her “waist.” But here too, the Red forces were attacked and cut off from supplies, and have suffered “frightful losses,” according to the Finns. The Karelian front is now quiet, and the Associated Press found big news yesterday in a Russian communique which admitted what everyone else has known for awhile -- some of the Russian forces in Finland are retreating.

“GRIMMER” TIMES COMING, SAYS CHAMBERLAIN. For those of you who didn’t hear the Chamberlain’s speech on the radio Tuesday, the Prime Minister told a lord mayor’s luncheon in London that Britain is approaching “a phase of this war much grimmer than anything we have seen yet.” According to the Associated Press, he said action so far on land and in the air was “merely preliminary” to the real fighting ahead -- although he said full-scale fighting at sea has reduced the German Navy by 238,000 tons. Ominous words, but he certainly deserves points for being realistic.

Chamberlain also touched upon the kind of world he wanted to see after Hitler is defeated -- one in which a United States of Europe might grow out of the current level of military, political, and economic cooperation between Britain and France. Nothing would do more to help the cause of peaceful reconstruction, he said, than for Anglo-French ties to “develop into something wider and deeper.”

LORD LOTHIAN PREDICTS A “RUTHLESS” NAZI ATTACK. Along the same lines, Britain’s ambassador to the U.S., Lord Lothian, predicted in a speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations last week that the Germans are gearing up for an enormous spring offensive, which will be carried out with “all the ferocity and ruthlessness the Nazis have taught us to expect.” Dorothy Thompson’s column in the New York Herald Tribune notes that Lothian, like Chamberlain, makes clear the choice in this war is between freedom and tyranny. Miss Thompson summarizes Lothian thusly --

“The question is whether we are to have a totalitarian world -- a world dominated by one race or by an association of master-races controlling through absolute governments the lives and work of their citizens and their helots -- or whether we are to give new, twentieth-century meanings to the words ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ and develop a cooperative world in which nations and persons can enjoy freedom, a manifold world in which the various civilizations can be brought into harmonious interplay with each other, and in which the eternal struggle of western man for freedom and equality will again be vindicated.”

A RUSSIAN INVASION OF AFGHANISTAN? A Newsweek story last week discusses the possibility that Soviet Russia might make soon an aggressive move southward, either in the Middle East or in the Balkans, “to recoup prestige and divert attention from the Finnish fiasco both abroad and at home.” Newsweek quotes what an Italian newspaper, Lavoro Fascista, calls “reliable reports” that about 40 Soviet infantry divisions, comprising 720,000 men, have been massed along with aircraft and cavalry on Afghanistan’s northern border. The Italians say these troops are poised to overrun the mountainous kingdom and attack the 33-mile-long Khyber Pass, the gateway to British India.

But one wonders how such an attack would help the Russians “recoup prestige” if the following sentence from Newsweek’s article is true -- “Motorized sections would be commanded not by Russians but by ‘foreigners’ -- presumably Germans -- ‘to avoid the lack of success similar to that experienced by the Russians in Finland.’” Ouch.