(3 of 3)
There is hope for the Red Army. At the worst, the Red Army might be defeated but not destroyed; it may, with Stalin and his Government, retire to Russia's great industrial reserve ground in the Urals. But a Russia merely holding out, cut off from its northern and Middle Eastern lines to its allies, would be no great threat to Germany. It is now clear that the Germans held their long winter front against the Red Army with some 25% of the total Nazi forces available for the Russian war. They could hold a weakened, narrowed Russian defensive front with even less.
The Allies' real hope is that the Russians did not have their main strength on the Kursk-Kharkov front, that they had saved their main reserves of men and material for a stand somewhere east of the Don. If this was true, then the U.S. and Great Britain might yet open a second air and land front in Europe in time to relieve Russia and the Red Army; the Germans might yet be halted before they had dismembered the U.S.S.R. and had driven on toward Caucasian oil and a juncture with Rommel in the pincered Middle East (see col. 3).
All this may be no wild and distant hope. But the blackest of all last week's black facts was that Russia and her allies had to fall back on hope.