Another Mission to Moscow

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 229, 12 November 1943, Page 3

Another Mission to Moscow

HE purpose of the recent Moscow conference was to keep the United Nations: united: the immediate, urgent, and | over-riding purpose. Whatever: else was attempted or discussed, that came first, and if it had not been achieved the result would have been world calamity. It was achieved. Though we shall not know for some time what military decisions were made, if amy were, we know that the political front was strengthened beyond all expectation. We know, in other words, that Hitler’s most dangerous weapon was knocked: out of his hands as the moment approached to use it. For it is not his armies that we must fear most in the months immediately ahead of us. It is his devilish political skill. He separated and disarmed the united nations before the war started, and almost succeeded in crushing them one by one. Now he must separate them again or be crushed himself, and we must be prepared for almost anything. Some wit-per-haps David Low-said recently that Hitler never lost a battle until he fired a gun. It is another way of saying that he had all his enemies beaten before he started shooting and bombing them. The military victories that followed were the direct, and usually easy, result of those earlier diplomatic triumphs, and the discussions that have just ended in Moscow are the first crushing defeat he has suffered as a political intriguer. We must not suppose that they are sufficient in themselves to destroy him. If they were victory would be already almost here. But we are fighting one of the most cunningly organised political machines the world has ever seen, and we shall be safe only when its designer is no longer at large. Meanwhile we can feel with the commentators that it would have hurt us less to lose an army than to have failed in this mission.