Tuesday, November 12, 1940

IS THE TIDE STARTING TO TURN? Suddenly, one sees something most unusual in the major newspapers’ war reports. Namely, an abundance of good news. The Associated Press reports that the Greek war is turning into an Italian rout -- the Greeks have decisively defeated a crack Alpini Centaur divison in the Pindus Mountains, seizing a "large number" of prisoners and the unit’s entire store of war materials. Meanwhile, Russell Hill writes in the New York Herald Tribune that at the southern end of the Greek front, where the attacking Italians previously had made some headway, they’re now in full retreat after their lines were broken in the Epirus sector. Mussolini’s invasion, the Herald Tribune says, is "bogged down on all fronts."

There’s more. The New York Times reports via special cable that General de Gaulle’s "Free French" forces are succeeding in an assault on the Vichy-held colony of Gabon, in French Equatorial Africa. The B.B.C. says de Gaulle troops have taken the capital, Libreville. And according to Times correspondent G.E.R. Gedye, diplomats in Turkey believe the upcoming visit to Berlin by Soviet Premier Molotoff is a sign that the Germans have become "desperate" to get Russian approval for Nazi designs on the Balkans and the Near East, in the wake of Hitler’s failure to crush Britain. Another A.P. dispatch reports "strong indications" from London that the British Near East army will soon be sent forth on the Empire’s first major land offensive of the war, apparently in Egypt.

It all sounds more promising than anything has in months -- but there were spurts of Allied optimism last February and last April which proved baseless. Molotoff surely isn’t being sent to Berlin for chit-chat, and if a new Nazi-Soviet agreement is signed which divides up Near East oilfields and the remainder of Eastern Europe, there might once again be some grim days ahead.

NO, THE TIDE ISN’T TURNING (YET). In his Monday Washington Post column, Barnet Nover tries to put a brake on the turning-point talk --

"Fourteen months after the outbreak of the war, five months after the crack-up of France, the total victory sought by Hitler and anticipated by Mussolini seems further off than ever. Something has gone wrong with the Axis time table. But it would be dangerously overoptimistic to assume that the war in Europe has reached a turning point. Perhaps it has. Future historians may reach the conclusion that the failure of Hitler’s aerial blitzkrieg against London marked the beginning of the end of the Nazi bid for world mastery. Or they may point to the vigor and skill of Greek resistance as the beginning of the decline in the curve of Axis fortunes. At the present moment, however, no one can afford to underestimate the still considerable advantages which Germany and Italy enjoy over the hard-pressed British and their allies. There is, for instance, the ominous circumstance that German and Italian submarines, German raiders and bombers have brought about a dangerous increase in British shipping losses during recent weeks. The British still have a very large merchant marine to draw on. But unless the rate of losses can be radically reduced they will find themselves in a desperate plight."

And Mr. Nover sees the Berlin conference with Molotoff as indication not that the Nazis are desperate, but that "British efforts to detach Moscow from the Axis appear to have met with flat failure." Still, Russia has made arguably pro-British and anti-Axis feints, particularly toward Turkey, and it’s reasonable to suspect that the Germans from now on will be paying a much higher price for Stalin’s cooperation than they’d like.

OPINION POLLS TAKE A BEATING. Arthur Krock writes in Sunday’s New York Times that the straw-vote opinion polls were "casualties" of the election. "How badly they were injured, and whether the degree of injury varied according to the luck of the poll, is yet to be determined," says he. Yet when Mr. Krock goes into particulars about how specific polls did, it doesn’t sound so bad --

"The straw tests which came chiefly to public attention were those conducted by Dr. Gallup. Emil Hurja, the Dunn Survey, The New York Daily News and Fortune Magazine. Fortune came within 1 per cent of discovering the popular majority Mr. Roosevelt would have in the nation as a whole, but it found that the margins indicated in the key States were ‘too small to be conclusive.’ The Daily News predicted the President’s victory in New York State by a ‘photo finish.’ The Dunn Survey predicted 364 electoral votes for Mr. Willkie and 124 for Mr. Roosevelt, and Mr. Hurja’s electoral straws for Mr. Willkie were in number 353. Fortune, though closer than any other to the popular majority in the country as a whole, was uncertain this would be reflected in an electoral majority. The Daily News’s ‘photo finish’ was not a precise description of the results in New York, though the President’s majority was small enough to be called a lead of half a length at the end of the race. The Dunn and Hurja prophecies were as incorrect as they were definite."

In other words, a couple of major polls got the result wrong, and three others got it right. Isn’t that about what you’d expect in a close election affected by a late trend toward the challenger? Mr. Krock’s own evidence shows that the Gallup surveys had a 4 per cent "margin of error" -- which in practice meant that eight states totalling 173 electoral votes, which Gallup had forecast going narrowly to Willkie, went narrowly to the President instead. And yet because of the "margin of error," the Gallup survey wasn’t really "wrong." Such uncertainties in modern polling might justify Mr. Krock’s prediction that "henceforth these polls will be scanned as interesting but not very important sidelights of campaigns." But I don’t believe they support the correspondent’s condescending verdict that the polls "are clearly no better than a survey by the State capitol correspondents of newspapers such as was published...in the New York Times."