The Peoples' Case

A British-Canadian millionaire, newspaper publisher and politician, Lord Beaverbrook, last week stated, in the simple terms of human instinct, the case of the peoples of the United Nations for a second front in Europe. Said he (at a publishers' dinner in Manhattan):

". . . In Britain the cry goes up: 'Attack! Attack in support of Russia!' For the passion to set up a western fighting front in aid of the Russians is deep in the hearts of all our people. . . . Russia may settle the war for us in 1942. By holding the Germans in check, possibly even by defeating them, the Russians may be the means of bringing the whole Axis structure down. This is a chance, an opportunity to bring the war to an end, here and now. . . . Strike out to help Russia! Strike out violently! Strike even recklessly! But in any event such blows that really help will be our share and contribution to the Russian battlefront."

These were not official words. Belligerent Lord Beaverbrook still has a war title (British-American Lend-Lease Coordinator), but he is no longer in Churchill's War Cabinet. He probably expected his words to irritate some British military men. Familiar with the difficulties in the way of a land offensive now in western Europe, he was apparently willing to try political pressure to get the difficulties overridden. He evidently did not consider the R.A.F.'s enormously increased air offensive a sufficient substitute for action on land.

The Beaver's case for a second front deliberately brushed beyond such military factors as the Allied shipping shortage, the drain on Britain's home defenses, the difficulties still in the way of all-out U.S. help in a continental offensive. His case rested in a single sentence: "If the Russians are defeated and driven out of the war, never will such a chance come to us again."

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