Review of the War A brief history of the present conflict, beginning with the retreat of the Germans from Moscow, is given by one of our historians. In November the Wehrmacht was pounding at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad and has swept far eastward to Rostov, threatening the Caucasus. Then, with the aid of crack regiments rushed from Siberia, of British and American tanks and planes, of winter which was early and severe, and above all- of the indomitable spirit of the Russian people, the Germans were halted. Russia seized the offensive and Hitler was forced to tell his anxious people that the campaign was ended, for the winter, and the German lines were re-forming- to the west. Even as the Russians were preparing their counter-offensive the English opened the long-awaited second front. On November 19 the imperial army of the Nile, enormously strengthened and reinforced with American planes and tanks, launched its own counter-offensive against the German and Italian armies in North Africa that promised to wrest all the Libya and of Tripoli from the axis grasp. With the change in the fortunes of war, voluntary collaboration seemed every day less likely. No longer did the triumph of Hitlers new order seem inevitable. Unrest swept the occupied countries of Europe, sabotage and violence revealing the unvanquished spirit of the defeated peoples, while in the mountains of Serbia and Greece new armies were formed to harry the conquerors. And, best of all, war production in the democracies was mounting every day in Britain, in the far-flung outposts of her empire, and in the United States, for now, at last, the new world had stepped forth with all its power and might to the rescue of the old. To Englishmen aid had seemed long in coming, yet the United States could not justly be charged with hesitation, timidly or procrastination. From the very beginning her leaders has seen the significance of the conflict, and from the beginning had thrown her moral weight on the side of the democracies. Material aid was slower, but a peace economy cannot be changed into a war economy overnight With a sureness and swiftness unprecedented in our own history, the administration had pledged to Britain all aid short of war. Peacetime conscription had created an army a million men; airplane production was geared to 30,000 planes a year; work on a two-ocean navy progressed with gratifying rapidity, while changes in neutrality legislation permitted Britain and China to procure what they most needed from the arsenal of democracy. And yet as the Wehrmacht marched from triumph it seemed that American aid, too, would be too little and too late. President Roosevelt pushed through, early in March, the lease-lend bill, and within the year almost 15,000,000,000 was appropriated to implement it. Yet much of what was sent never arrived, for U-boats took their toll of American as of British goods, and common sense required that what we shipped should be delivered. Swiftly American outposts of defense were extended across the Atlantic to Greenland and then to Iceland. The Germans, correctly regarding American intervention as unneutral, threatened to send to the bottom any ships carrying aid to Britain. The sinking of the Robin Moor and the attack on the Greer proved that they meant business. Roosevelt struck back with an order to the navy to shoot on sight any axis ships. Roosevelt and Churchill, meeting in the mid-Atlantic, already had charted the course of the future, and faced with a free choice between the new order and the Atlantic charter none could hesitate. It was well that the United States was prepared for war, for in another quarter of the globe ominous clouds darkened the skies. For a decade Japan had pushed forward her plan for domination of the Far East, in obligations. The American attitude, from the beginning, had been consistent, but it had confined its expression pretty largely to the realm of moral disapprobation. Even what the Japanese, with a unique display of humor, called the China incident, evoked only minor repercussions in the United States.