TOO CAUTIOUS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 October 1942, Page 2

TOO CAUTIOUS

MILITARY HIGH COMMAND ACCORDING TO LORD STRABOLGI OPINIONS ON SECOND FRONT. IN UNITED STATES & BRITAIN. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) LONDON, October 8. “The military High Command is too cautious and too prudent in its consideration of opening a second front in the west,” declared Lord Strabolgi, the Labour peer and former naval commander, in a speech. “The Dieppe raid could have been successful only if it had been repeated in the following week and kept up. The ideal time for a second front was last October. Preparation for the second front should have been begun independently of United States intervention.” The British seemed afraid of Red Europe, said Lord Strabolgi. He believed they must have a Red Europe to destroy Nazism. That did not mean Communist: it meant Red in the Socialist Democratic sense.

The Washington correspondent of the “Christian Science Monitor” says that the United States Government has determined that the American people are ready for the casualties inevitable in establishing a second front. On the basis of extensive and independent surveys, the Government is assured that public opinion is amply prepared to assimiliate whatever shocks might be involved in a large-scale land invasion of Europe. The Government’s testing of public opinion is not concerned with the military feasibility of a second front, and the survey does not shed any light on the imminence of a second front. “The Russians want a second front even if it fails to succeed,” says the “New York Times.” “Our Western Allies (Britain) hold out for a successful invasion, because on this the whole issue of the war hangs. Their thesis is that the war cannot be lost in Russia, but can be lost for everybody if the grand offensive which is being prepared fails. Russia has performed prodigies, but the time is surely coming when the main battle of the war will be fought elsewhere. In other words, the second front must be a first front.”