The Pittsburgh Press (September 1, 1944)
Editorial: 1939 – September 1 – 1944
Five years ago, at dawn, Hitler struck Poland. Most of the world was drawn into the worst war in history.
Today the once near-victor – first stopped at Moscow, Stalingrad and El Alamein – has been driven from most of Italy and France, from half of Poland and part of the Balkans. His subs are sunk, his air force and panzers riddled, his oil reserves almost gone, communications strained, plants blasted, and his Nazi Junker command rotten with internal feuds. Gen. Eisenhower predicts total victory over Germany before Christmas – provided there is all-out Allied effort on the battlefronts and home fronts.
Just as Poland – the first victim – became the symbol of German barbarism, now on the eve of Nazi defeat Poland is becoming the test of Allied peace plans. Liberation of Warsaw is delayed while rival Polish factions in Moscow and London fail to agree on a provisional government. Behind that is the struggle over whether there is to be a free, and perhaps federated, Europe, or puppet states divided between a Russian sphere of influence in the east and a British sphere in the west.
Secretary of State Hull, after persuading Russia and Britain to sign the Moscow Pact with the United States, announced that there would be no more spheres of influence, no more balance of power. Since then, the acts of Russia in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and British policies have pointed toward a British-Russian balance of power in Europe. Prime Minister Churchill has publicly underwritten Marshal Stalin’s East European policy.
And neither Poland nor any other small nation is represented on the London Big Three commission which is drawing the peace settlement, or at the Dumbarton Oaks Big Three conference which is drafting a new League of Nations to be controlled by a council dominated by the big powers. Still British and American officials repeat the pledges of a democratic and just peace in which small nations will share equally, and the Russians insist despite appearances that they want a strong, free Poland.
Russia has a right to insist that no government in Poland, or in any other Eastern European state, shall plot against her or be used as a puppet against her by another big power or by a future Germany. But Marshal Stalin has no right, under a democratic peace, to have a Russian puppet regime in Warsaw.
The same, of course, applies to Britain in Western Europe and elsewhere, and to the United States in this hemisphere and the Far East.
More is involved than moral issues or Allied pledges. Big-power domination won’t work. It enabled Germany and Japan to break the last “peace” by playing one power against another. It would invite repetition by the same easy process.
If the big powers, one or three, dictate the Polish and other settlements, if they restore the vicious balance-of-power system, if they create a league which they control but which cannot control them, they will defy history and court World War III. That must not be.