Yet it is also evident that, having determined to make a stand, the Germans have been able to put up a resistance which testifies to their continued strength and dampens hopes for their quick defeat. We have still to see the whole significance of the Dnieper River battle. Did the Germans actually decide to hold the Dnieper line “at all costs”? Or did they seek to hold it only to gain time in order to extricate their armies from the Crimea and then continue their retreat to the so-called Moltke line from Lake Peipus, or possibly Riga, to Odessa?
Only the result of the battle can provide the answer, and any indications of what the answer will be are undoubtedly being watched with the keenest interest by the three-Power conference in Moscow. For to the Russians a crumbling of the Dnieper front would be a demonstration that all that is necessary for a quick victory is another front in the west, since the Germans would be shown to be no longer able to stem any determined assault in force.
NOVEMBER 1, 1943
DIMOUT ENDS TODAY EXCEPT BY THE SEA
Police Get Rules for Voluntary Compliance—Street Lights to Be 90% Normal
New York Police Commissioner Lewis J. Valentine issued to all borough commanders yesterday a ten-point set of instructions for their guidance in obtaining voluntary compliance with the “brownout” that is to go into effect today to conserve electricity as a substitute for the dimout that has been in effect for eighteen months.
These instructions revealed that shields would be removed from all traffic lights except those visible from the sea; that street, parkway and bridge lighting would be restored to 90 per cent of normal except where visible from the sea; that masks might be removed from automobile headlights and that the Police Department would take many steps to conserve electricity and thereby reduce the consumption of coal.
OBSERVANCE TO BE VOLUNTARY
The orders issued by Mr. Valentine made it plain, however, that observance was to remain on a strictly voluntary basis. They provided that when a member of the department discovered a violation of the recommendations for business establishments and electric display signs, he was to warn and admonish the offender when possible.
Under no circumstances is a summons to be served or a summary arrest made of any offender, according to the orders. Instead, reports of violations are to be filed in alphabetical and numerical order of the streets and avenues in each precinct. The orders provide that the precinct commander “shall take such further action as may be necessary to insure compliance with these instructions.”
The instructions set forth that the engineering bureau of the Police Department was removing shields from traffic lights as rapidly as possible, and that street, parkway and bridge lighting would be restored to 90 per cent of the pre-war normal as measured in kilowatt hours. The excepted areas include those parts of the Rockaways, Coney Island, the south shore of Brooklyn, and the east and southeast shores of Staten Island that are visible from the sea.
AUTO HEADLIGHT INSTRUCTIONS
Masks may be removed from automobile headlights, according to the instructions, but under no circumstances will other than parking lights be permitted along the coast showing seaward. In all other areas low-beam headlights will be permitted, Mr. Valentine noted, as already announced, that subway and elevated trains, surface cars and buses would return to normal prewar lighting.
Outdoor advertising, promotional and display sign lighting will be eliminated in the daytime as well as at night, the instructions disclosed. Electric signs necessary for the identification of places of public service, however, such as shops, stores, theatres, restaurants, public lodging establishments and transportation terminals, may be operated for two hours between dusk and 10 P.M.
Show window lighting must remain as at present and not be increased in intensity, according to the Commissioner’s instructions, but the issuance of (A) and (B) certificates for show windows will be discontinued.
Lighting of marquees and building entrances will be eliminated completely in the daytime, and will be reduced as much as is consistent with public safety at night, according to Mr. Valentine. He also directed that lighting of outdoor business establishments be eliminated completely in the daytime and reduced as much as possible at night.
“Occupants of residences and hotels are to turn off lights when not actually needed and eliminate waste in the use of various electric appliances in homes,” the instructions continued.
“Commercial and industrial customers are to turn off lights and appliances when not actually needed. Note: Army air raid regulations require that, at all times, during the hours of darkness, occupants of premises and operators of road vehicles and other conveyances shall not have any unattended lighting.”
The police commissioner also announced that the present speed laws of twenty miles an hour at night and twenty-five miles an hour in the daytime would remain in effect except where properly authorized signs indicating greater or lesser speed limits were posted.
MAYOR SOUNDS A WARNING
Mayor La Guardia, in his weekly radio talk over Municipal Station WNYC yesterday, warned that it might be necessary at any time to return to the dimout regulations and that “we will continue to have air raid drills.”
The public was told not to expect street lights to return to their former brilliancy immediately. The Mayor cautioned that it would be some time before the entire 70,000 bulbs that are required would be obtained. He said the first batch would be delivered next Monday.
The Mayor disclosed that he was now receiving in his mail “kicks” against the suspension of the dimout, some complaints going so far as to say the dimmed-out lights in subway trains were good for the eyes.
“How would you like to be Mayor of New York?” he asked. “Well, let’s say it’s funny, because if you didn’t think these things were funny you’d just go plain crazy. No matter what we do, the mail continues and the protests continue.”
The Statue of Liberty lit only by her torch of two 200-watt lamps instead of the usual thirteen 1,000-watt lamps and pier lights, on Bedloe’s Island during New York City’s wartime lighting dimout to conserve energy costs.
NOVEMBER 2, 1943
WAR-CRIME TRIALS SETTLED BY ALLIES
Russia, for First Time, Takes Definitive Stand With the Other Major Powers
Special to The New York Times.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 1—The three-power declaration on German atrocities, the most strongly worded yet issued on the subject and the only one in which Premier Stalin has directly participated, defined today for the first time the jurisdiction over the responsible individuals and the time for their trial and punishment. Those questions were left unsettled in a similar Anglo-American declaration published last Aug. 29 and in earlier warnings made individually by the President and Prime Minister.
While the Russian Government, by various means, had previously made plain its agreement on the general principle of the punishment of war criminals, the lack of complete mutual understanding had been reflected in such incidents as Russia’s demand for the immediate trial of Rudolf Hess, Deputy Fuehrer of Germany, after his capture in England.
Today’s statement made it clear that Russia now agreed with the United States and Britain that the punishment of war criminals should await the armistice and that jurisdiction would be delegated to the respective countries wronged instead of to an international tribunal, as had been suggested unofficially. The statement mentioned various atrocities perpetrated by the Germans in countries that they have overrun, emphasizing particularly the “monstrous crimes on the territory of the Soviet Union.” In the name of the thirty-three United Nations, it gave “full warning” to the Germans.
Detailed lists will be compiled in all the wronged countries, especially the overrun parts of Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Crete and other islands, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France and Italy.
Thus, the statement pointed out, the war criminals will know that they will be brought back to the scenes of their c
rimes “and judged on the spot by the peoples whom they have outraged.”
NOVEMBER 4, 1943
Platoon of Dogs Helps Marines On Bougainville
By The United Press.
WITH UNITED STATES MARINES ON BOUGAINVILLE, Nov. 1 (delayed)—The first Marine dog platoon went into action when the Marines landed today on Bougainville Island, last major Japanese stronghold in the Solomons.
The dogs included twenty-one Doberman pinschers and three German shepherds under the “command” of Lieut. Clyde Henderson of Breckville, Ohio.
Part of the platoon was divided into scout, messenger and first aid units. The first unit will be employed to smell out enemy nests. The second will carry messages to rear headquarters. The third searches out wounded who have crawled to cover.
Lieutenant Henderson said this was the first time a trained dog unit had been employed in this war by American armed forces.
NOVEMBER 21, 1943
Three Men of Destiny
On Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin depend the shape of things to come—three men of sharp contrast, but alike in the power they wield.
By ANNE O’HARE MCCORMICK
The stage is set for one of those great occasions on which history hinges. Preparations have long been under way for a meeting of the three men who are the spokesmen and the symbols of the three most powerful nations on earth. Since the Moscow conference of their Foreign Secretaries it has been clear to all the world that they have an appointment with one another—and with destiny.
It is easy to visualize a meeting of the men, from points very far apart in time and space and ideology, sitting down for the first time at the same table to discuss the future of the world. In the background is a vast panorama of battle—the pounding of the Red Armies driving the Nazis out of Russia, the roar of German cities going up in smoke, the fire of Anglo-American guns blasting the road to Rome. As war commanders, Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill are acutely conscious of these mighty movements in the field. They know that a decisive shifting of pressure from the Eastern to the Western front is in full progress. But though war has made them allies, almost without their own volition, the primary purpose of their meeting is not to discuss war strategy. The military plans are made and the issue of the conflict is beyond doubt. What at last brings the three leaders together in person is the certainty that the war is won.
This is the great significance of the conference. It is a peace conference, held to confirm and fill in the outlines of the agreements signed by the Foreign Ministers in Moscow. Since it could not take place until a basis of agreement was reached, it is a dramatic notification to the world that the victors are resolved to perpetuate their partnership and work out a joint strategy for victory.
Here is a scene that will live as one of the famous conversation pieces of our epoch. The table is likely to be smaller and the conversation more private and informal than in the Hull-Eden-Molotoff meeting. In the most important talks the three men will probably be alone except for an interpreter or two. Stalin always provides his own, and while the necessity of translation will slow up the give-and-take, it will not dam the flow of discussion. The President and the Prime Minister are fluent, highly expressive men who relish the flavor of their own phrases. Stalin, for all his reputation as a man of mystery, is by no means a man of silence. He has the blunt decisiveness of a leader who is never contradicted, but he was trained in the Marxist dialectic and he is given to embroidering his points with copious arguments.
Even the shapes of the faces are a study in contrasts. The round, cherubic countenance of the Briton differs as sharply from the square, pock-marked visage of the Georgian as both do from the oval, smiling face of the American. Stalin’s cool eyes are watchful under a grizzled brush of hair. As he sits calmly smoking his pipe, the effect of power in repose heightened by occasional slow, lithe, panther-like movements, he does not miss a gesture or expression.
The President’s eyes are cool, too, and slightly quizzical. He makes large gestures with his long-holdered cigarette, and appears more casual and at ease than the others, but his unquenchable curiosity and his interest in this encounter, which he has desired for years, make him as alert as Stalin. Churchill listens with half-closed eyes, slumped in his chair. He chews his fat cigar more than he smokes it, and this gives him a slightly ruminant air. But nothing escapes him either, and his opinions are delivered with a flash and vigor that show the high tension of his mind.
These are the men cast by destiny to play stellar roles in the tremendous drama of war and peace. They are alike in the power they wield and the massive self-confidence with which each in his different way exercises his authority. Stalin is the absolute dictator, master of a party machine that has welded “all the Russias” into a unity and force they never knew before. He stands guard over the biggest land mass on earth, a living Colossus of Rhodes who straddles two continents and links them into one.
There is not the slightest prospect that he will modify the system which has proved stronger under the test of war than even he could have predicted. Obviously it gives him an advantage in negotiation over the heads of democratic governments, who can never decide anything with the same finality, or speak without looking behind their shoulders at their parliaments and their public.
Yet the war, while it has increased Stalin’s popularity, has in some degree diminished his power. It has obliged him to take more people into council—the military chiefs, the directors of the war industries, the spokesmen of soldiers, refugees, peasants—and the effect of this wider consultation, plus the force of events, is clearly visible in the changes that are taking place within the Soviet system while the fighting goes on. By the same logic the war has given authority very like that of a dictator to Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill. They have been obliged to assume extraordinary powers, to make secret plans and decisions, to impose military censorships that often lap over into civilian fields. Total war applies its own rules, its own uniformity. Hence, as war leaders, the three statesmen meet on a basis nearer equality of function than would be possible in peacetime.
All three, moreover, are by nature men of strong will who are irked by interference. Roosevelt cloaks his masterful temperament in an amiable manner. Stalin’s steely hardness is hardly concealed by his level voice, his lusty humor and the genial prodigality with which he dispenses Oriental hospitality. Churchill is much more the bulldog type than either. He is John Bull in person, short, round, rosy, a mighty trencherman and a mighty talker, whose eloquent tongue lisps in private conversation, but not in hesitation, and always in the ringing rhythms of Milton and the King James Bible.
Such likenesses are not strange in leaders who are not where they are by accident. They have forged their way to the top because they are rulers by will and temperament. What is strange is that they have reached their present eminence, truly awful in its responsibility, from such different backgrounds and by such different processes. The representatives of democracy are both aristocrats. Churchill likes to think he is half American, but he is English in every fiber of his being and every turn of his thought.
He has not always belonged to the Conservative party, but he is nevertheless a true Conservative and a professing imperialist in the British style, which is ample enough to adapt itself to new conditions. He has not always held office, and but for the war would never have realized a lifelong ambition to be Prime Minister. Yet he has always been in politics, a passionate parliamentarian. In their lives and thought and view of government there is no common meeting ground between Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin.
Roosevelt and Stalin have a point of contact in that both are more adept politicians than Churchill. They share a relish for politics as a game. The Soviet leader gained control of the Communist party and changed its direction by adroit and patient manipulation: Under entirely different conditions, the President’s skill as a political maneuverer has changed the political alignments in this country without changing the part
y labels.
But there the likeness ends, Roosevelt typifies the oldest and solidest America. His Groton-Harvard-Hyde Park background is near Mr. Churchill’s, but as remote from Stalin’s as the White House is from the Kremlin. Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt can have even an imaginative conception of the life of the cobbler’s son of Tiflis who grew up as a conspirator, holding up banks and organizing underground revolution in Czarist Russia while Lenin and the intellectual leaders of the revolution were producing its literature abroad.
The two democratic statesmen are types and products of a world that Stalin has never known, and he is the product of a world that they have never known. Roosevelt and Churchill have flourished in the upper strata of a free society, have traveled widely, have reached their present position through the smooth working of a well-established democratic system. Stalin fought his way up from the underground; he is the first guerrilla leader come to power. Perhaps the most vital hiatus between them as they talk is that the Englishman and the American know the world and do not know Russia, while the Russian knows Russia and does not know the world.
The President, asked not long ago what he would say to Stalin when they met, replied that to begin with he would announce that he was a realist and intended to discuss the problems that had to be dealt with in common on the basis of realism. This is a tribute to Stalin as the “great realist.” But it implies that his definition of realities is the same as ours. On the question of Russia’s western borderlands, for instance, the Soviet position is very clear. Not only the Moscow press and other Soviet spokesmen but Stalin himself has announced that the frontiers they claim are beyond discussion. This may be true for Russia, but the President and the Prime Minister are uncomfortably aware that they are not beyond discussion in Great Britain and the United States.
The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945 Page 105