Milford chronicle., 1944-01-07
-. ,no11,,n rIIE EApr1J =,

ALL AROUND THE EARTH. as
Friday night dissolved into Satur-
day morning, millions saluted the
hope of victory in Europe i'll 1914
and in the Far East, perhaps, not
long thereafter. The great sue
cesses of the Red Army in southern
Russia. the growing weight of the
air offensive, the steady accelera-
tiOn of the advance in the Pacific,
the massive preparations in Great
Britain. the quietly confident pre-
dictiOn of General Eisenhower,
echoed by many other leaders. all
sustained the belief that the great
struggle is entering its final phase.
1t will very probably be hard and
bloody one, but the broad facts of
the military situation seem too
plain. the balance of material and
moral forces too Overwhelmingly
against the aggressor nations. to
permit of any other conclusion.
Naturally. there are many un-
known factors in the calculation,
however. and one of the most i'm
portant is the real attitude of the
Nazi and Japanese war lords. What
are they actually hoping for? They
know by this time that their great
and criminal gamble has failed;
they cannot possibly expect vic
tory. How do they foresee the
probable outcome? If they are aim
ing for a compromise peace, more
or less on the basis of the present
military position. they have given
very few signs of it. There have
been rumors of clandestine peace
feelers, but they are not very cred
ible; and there has certainly been
nothing like the public peace Of
fensives" which were made by the
Germans in 1916 and again in 1918.
The experience of those years re-
mains as a warning to the Nazi
and Japanese leaders of the fu-
tility and the danger of such at
tempts.
But if they are not expecting to
angle for a compromise all that
remains to them is to hang on grim
lily. in the hope that sooner or
later they will tire or divide the
United Nations and so escape with
something less than extinction. 1t
must be a very slim hope by this
time To Hitler and TOTO ii must
be obvious that the immense forces
which the Allies have at last mo-
biliZed against them are not going
TO be merely held in suspense or
sent home; and after the Cairo and
Teheran conferences it must be
difficult to keep alive the dream
of inter-Allied disruption. But the
dream is all that these leaders. per-
sonally, have to go on, and it can
he expected that they will cling TO
it fiercely until the very end-the
more fiercely the nearer that end
AS long as they are
able to sacrifice their own people
in order to save their skins they
can be expected to do so; and since
the Allies are still pretty far from
the vital centers of Germany's and
Japan's physical powers of resis-
tance. the result is likely to be a
very bitter struggle.
The only way to shorten it is to
convince the leaders that they are
losing their hold over their own
people; and every sign of Allied
lisunity, every hint of internal di-
vision or complaceny which they
:an exploit in their propaganda
will make it just so much more =
liflicult to shake them. That is
Why a high Washington authority
las angrily described the rail and
teel strike threats as an Allied
defeat" that is why the victory,
hough it now seems certain, can T
till be very costly one and will
,e made just so much more costly u
n the lives of our men by every
however Insignificant in =
Lself. of inter-Allied or internal :,
isunity. u