sy

TH

S WEEK:

The War Fronts, The

Warships Soften Island For Surrender

Powerful flashes Split the night and highlighted the super-
structure of this British warship as it shelled Pantelleria

shortly before the Italian island fortress

Allied forces.

surrendered to

The

War

The Great Offensive Opens

The long-awaited Nazi offensive on the Eastern Front got
under way this week but not according to the familiar blitz-

krieg pattern.
this year is only on a limited sec-
tor—165 miles in length—between
Orel and Belgorod, a far cry from
the first year, when the Wehr-
macht advanced on a 1,700 mile
front, or the offensive in 1942. Ob-
servers took this to indicate that
the Nazis are no longer able to
accumulate the men and materials
necessary for their early great
cross-country. sweeps.

The limited nature of the 1943
drive, however, made it possible
for Hitler to pile up a tremendous
striking force estimated at 450,000
men, including 14 tank divisions.
He was apparently confident that
this tremendous weight of men

The main thing to note is that the offensive

and machines would be able to
spearhead swiftly through the
Kursk plains from two directions

and pinch off the Soviet salient .

extending westward from Kursk
itself. What happened to those
Nazi plans has been told in the
news of the past three days. ‘Thirty
thousand of the Hitlerites have
been killed, 1539 tanks destroyed
and 649 planes shot down. And for
that enormous loss of manpower
and equipment, Hitler can show
only minor gains in the Belgorod
sector, while elsewhere Red Army
forces, long massed in great
strength for the expected offen-
sive, have held their lines against

all attacks.

Hitler Gambles Desperately

With the absence of Allied offensive action from the West,
considerable speculation has been aroused this week as to

Hitler’s latest offensive action

decided that he can take a chance
against the Soviets before the sec-
ond front gets under way? Or is
he making a desperate attempt to
prevent a Red Army offensive to
synchronize with an Allied inva-
sion of Western and Southwestern
Europe.

Credence is lent to this latter
view by the fact that the Germans
have sown vast minefields before
their lines.

With the continued absence of
the second front, however, Hitler
may well try a new drive on Mos-
cow, hoping to reduce the Red
Army or at least make it incapable
of an offensive by the time that
he will be forced to fight in the
West.

on the Eastern Front. Has he

Meantime more and more indi-
cations point to the gathering of
Allied forces for a leap into Eur-
ope. While Hitler is gambling on
the western front being delayed,
and therefore is not removing any
of his forces from the east, an
attack by the Allies in the coming
days and weeks can start the co-
ordinated drive by which Hitler
Germany will be doomed this year
and the theater of war shifted to
the soil of Germany herself before
the snow flies.

The US offensive in the Pacific
is gathering strength and makes
possible the frustration of Axis
plans for using the Japanese end
of the triangle to prevent invasion
of Europe.

~

Nazi Military Strength
In Moscow this week the newspaper Pravda made a sharp

denial of an Associated Press report that the order had been
given for transfer of 50 Nazi divisions to other parts of Europe

from the Eastern Front. Declared
Pravda: “. .. (it) is either misin-
formation or an error committed by

people who lack understanding in
matters of intelligence service.”
The AP report claimed that at the
time of the transfer order, Ger-
manys divisions were distributed
as folows: 180 divisions in the
USSR, 40 in France, Belgium and
Holland, 10 to 20 in the Balkans,
five to 10 in Italy, eight to 10 in
Norway, and 40 in reserve.
Pravda’s reply declared that “in
reality” there are 211 Nazi divisions
in the Soviet Union, not 180. Out

side the Soviet-German front there
are 91 German divisions, and not
j20. There is not one German di--
vision in Italy at present.

In addition, the 40 German Te-~
serve divisions mentioned by the
AP correspondent is also wrong,
for, declares Pravda, “if all the di-
visiong in Germany and Austria are
considered reserves, there are only
90 of them, and an absolute ma-
jority have a limited fighting ca-
pacity.

“As for the Balkans, there are
eight to 10 German divisions there
of equally limited fighting ca-
pacity.” =

4

Czechoslovakia

Nazis Fail To Chain Czechs

Czech workers are playing a leading part in activities against
the German occupation authorities and in the underground move-
ment for a free Czechoslovakia. Czech workers from factories

and workshops are ascending the
scaffold side by side with Czech
generals and intellectuals. Thous-
ands of Czech workers have been
executed by the Nazis who have
attempted to undermine the or-
ganized force of Czech workers
and break the spirit of national
liberation.

When the German occupation
forces discovered that terror did
not dampen the democratic spirit -
of the people, they tried demagogy,
making use of clever maneuvers to
induce the Czechs toe work obedi-
ently for the German war machine.
The Germans tried to divide the
people by proclaiming that they
considered only Czech intellectu-
als as enemies of the Third Reich.
They endeavored to gain the co-
operation of the workers by offer-
ing crusts from the rich booty
grabbed from. the Czechs. They
offered ridiculous bribes such as
‘enjoy life’ campaigns, granted ‘va-
cations’ to workers. They also shep-
herded the workers to theaters

where Czech culture was mangled
and mutilated. Czech workers met
these actions with sabotage against
German war production.

The Skoda munitions factories,
now operated as a Herman Goering
concern, is cited as a specific ex-
ample of the type of sabotage car-
ried on by the Czech worker-pa-
triots. Although the workers are
interspersed with German work-
ers and surrounded by spies and
supervisors, they thave been able to
decrease outputs considerably. En-
tire factory departments have been
paralyzed and shipments of guns
and other materials have been
rendered useless as a result of

sabotage.
During these four years of san-
guinary struggle, Gzechoslovak

workers have closed ranks and this
workers unity is actively aiding
the re-establishment of a free
Czechoslovakia. Hitler has failed
utterly in his attempts to chain
down Czech workers in the Nazi-
controlled labor unions.

India

‘Profit-Grabhing’ Millowners _

A charge that “the profit-grabbing of millionaire millowners”
threatens to bring about a cloth crisis in India “as disastrous as
the present food and political crisis’ was made this week by

S. A. Dange, president of the All-

India Trades Union Congress.
“At a time when our country

stands under the threat of fascist

invasion, these millowmers are
thinking only of their profits,”
Dange said. “The army that de-
fends our frontiers must get its
uniforms, and the men and»women
in our factories and fields must get
their “dhoties’ and “sarees” at
prices they can afford.”

Dange welcomed the govern-
ment’s June 16 order instituting
price and production eontrols for
cloth, cotton and yarn, but warned
that labor must watch carefully to
see that these controls are strictly
carried out.

The usual excuse put forward for
the cloth shortage—that the indus-
try has to depend for its machinery,
parts and chemicals on imports
which are difficult to obtain in
wartime—is only one side of the
story. In 1942 lockouts by the mill-
owners in Ahmedabad alone de-
prived the country of 300,000,000

yards of cloth. Pointing eut that
the war had opened up profitable
African, mid-Asian and Australian
markets to Indian exports, Dange
said that this had caused the mill-
owners “to keep their products off
the home markets and to sabotage
the cheap standard cloth scheme
for India put forward in January
1942.”

Price control and penalization of
hoarders, though completely neces-
sary, cannot solve the crisis by
themselves. What is needed is in-
creased production—and this can
only be obtained through the active
intervention and cooperation of the
workers, which so far neither the
employers nor the government have
permitted. Dange called for the
setting up of joint production com-
mittees in all mills, and for the ex-
pansion of existing People’s Food
Committees so as to permit them
to supervise the government's cloth
control scheme. This alone would
give a popular basis to the cam-
paign to control cloth distribution
and defeat hoarders and profiteers.

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