Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/moyfiles/1942moy.001

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                                                                                January 4, 1943

Man of the Year:Joseph Stalin



     Die, But Do Not Retreat

     The year 1942 was a year of blood and strength. The man
whose name means steel in Russian, whose few words of English
include the American expression "tough guy" was the man of 1942.
Only Joseph Stalin fully knew how close Russia stood to defeat in
1942, and only Joseph Stalin fully knew how he brought Russia
through.

     But the whole world knew what the alternative would have
been. The man who knew it best of all was Adolf Hitler, who found
his past accomplishments turning into dust.

     Had German legions swept past steel-stubborn Stalingrad and
liquidated Russia's power of attack, Hitler would have been not
only man of the year, but he would have been undisputed master of
Europe, looking for other continents to conquer. He could have
diverted at least 250 victorious divisions to new conquests in
Asia and Africa. But Joseph Stalin stopped him. Stalin had done
it before -- in 1941 -- when he started with all of Russia
intact. But Stalin's achievement of 1942 was far greater. All
that Hitler could give he took -- for the second time.

     Men of Good Will. Above the heavy tread of nations on the
march, above the staccato uproar of the battlefields, only a few
men of peace were heard in 1942.

     Britain's William Temple, who made his pilgrimage to
Canterbury in 1942 and became the new Archbishop, was one of
them. His church-approved program of reforms brought religion
closer to the center of British national life than at any time
since Cromwell's Roundheads. Temple challenged all Britain's
well-established institutions of economic privilege, espoused the
cause of mankind's economic freedom (which Britain loosely calls
socialism), probably to leave a lasting mark on British history.

     Another man who may leave a similar mark is Henry J. Kaiser,
the man who launched one of his Liberty ships in four days and 15
hours and, more important, preached as a practical businessman
"full production for full employment." His gospel challenged U.S.
industry to lead the post-war world out of depression.

     A third man who left a mark was Wendell Willkie, whose
world-circling trip as the politician without office had an
effect perhaps more lasting than the U.S. yet realizes on U.S.
relations with Russia and the Orient.

     But Willkie's accomplishment was dimmed by his failure to
command the firm support of his party, and the plain fact was
that in 1942, a year of war, men of good will had no achievements
to match those of men of arms and men of power.

     Men of War. Flamboyant Erwin Rommel and cold-mouthed Fedor
von Bock were Germany's two top generals in a year whose laurels
were reserved primarily for fighting men. Rommel, who drove to
within 70 miles of Alexandria before he was stopped by the
British, established himself as one of the great virtuosos among
field commanders. Bock directed a brilliant campaign which
reached the west bank of the Volga, but the final spark that
would have meant victory was not in him.

     The greatest military conquests of the year -- although not
against the greatest forces -- were those of frog-legged Tomoyuki
Yamashita, who blasted the British out of Singapore, the Dutch
out of the Indies and the U.S. out of Bataan and Corregidor.
Yamashita in one year successfully seized a great empire for his
country. On his side were advantages in numbers, in preparation,
in the stupidity of the Allied nations, but Yamashita
successfully capitalized on them.

     Quite different were the military triumphs of Yugoslavia's
General Draja Mihailovich, who capitalized on a conquered
nation's unconquerable urge for freedom to fight when fighting
seemed impossible. But before the year was out thousands of his
countrymen, probably distrusting the Yugoslav Government in Exile
more than they did Mihailovich, supported the rival Partisan
guerrillas who were carving out their own fighting front. From
high on the crags of southern Serbia, Mihailovich, a great
fighter, saw, instead of the unification of his country, a
preview of rival aims and clashing ideologies which may bring out
a rash of civil wars in post-war Europe.

     As for the military men of the U.S., 1942 offered them few
opportunities for great achievement. General Eisenhower's able
occupation of North Africa only placed him on the threshold of
his real test. Douglas MacArthur, whose brilliant skill and
courage raised him to the rank of hero while he fought an
inevitably losing fight, still lacked the means to win the crown
of a great victory. Outstanding among Americans for
accomplishment in battle stood the name of Admiral William
Halsey, who, not once but again & again, took his task force into
swift encounters against the Japs to deal them telling blows.

     Yet no military man from Rommel to Halsey was the man of
1942 for a good sufficient reason: there was no military victory
of the year which showed signs of being conclusive.

     Men of Power. There was perhaps no more unlikely place to
look for a Man of 1942 than in prostrate France. Yet two
Frenchmen, both of whom the U.S. disliked and distrusted, rose to
the top of a soiled political heap. One of them was Pierre Laval,
who rose to the honor of a meeting with Hitler to which the
tragicomic Benito Mussolini was not invited. If Hitler wins,
Pierre Laval may yet be a successful man. Jean Francois Darlan's
deal with General Eisenhower might have profited him eventually,
but his award was an assassin's bullet.

     A far greater step to power was taken by a Japanese. From
behind his horn-rimmed glasses and the ask-ack of his cigar
smoke, Premier Hideki Tojo emerged as a character worthy of his
nickname: The Razor. He, like Stalin, was tough. So were his
people. He took the major political risk of the year in tackling
Britain and the U.S., and, for the year, it turned out to be a
good speculation. His armies conquered Hong Kong, the
Philippines, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies and Burma. Never in
history had one nation conquered so much so quickly. Seldom had
any nation's fighting abilities been underestimated so badly.
Tojo, or Emperor Hirohito, in whose name all Japanese wage holy
war, might well have been the man of the year, if the explosive
Japanese campaigns had not shown signs of burning out.

     For the great leaders of the United Nations 1942 was another
story. China's Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek struggled on
stubbornly against China's internal problems and the invading
Japanese. Britain's Winston Churchill, Man of 1940, delivered
victory in Egypt after standing on the verge of defeat. Franklin
Roosevelt, Man of 1941, shouldered mountainous problems, solved
some, left others still crying to be solved. He successfully
brought the weight of the U.S. to bear against the Axis. But the
1942 accomplishments of Chiang, of Churchill and of Roosevelt
will not bear fruit till 1943. And, worthy though they may prove,
they inevitably pale by comparison with what Joseph Stalin did in
1942.

     At the beginning of the year Stalin was in an unenviable
spot. During the year before he had sold over 400,000 miles of
territory at the price of saving most of his army. Gone was a big
fraction -- how large only he knew -- of the precious tanks,
planes and war equipment which he had been hoarding for years
against the Nazi attack. Gone was roughly one-third of Russia's
industrial capacity, on which he depended for replacements. Gone
was nearly half of Russia's best farmland.

     With all this gone, Stalin had to face another full-weight
blow from the Nazi war machine. For every trained soldier the
Germans had lost in the previous year's battles, he had probably
lost as many and more. For every bit of valuable experience which
his soldiers and commanders had gained, the Germans had had the
opportunity to gain an equal amount.

     Stalin still had the magnificent will to resist of the
Russian people -- who had as much claim to glory as the British
people had when they withstood the blitz of 1940. But a strong
people had not prevented the loss of White Russia and the
Ukraine. Would they be any better able to prevent the conquest of
the Don basin, of Stalingrad, of the Caucasus? The strongest will
to resist can eventually crack under continued defeat.

     Only one new resource had Stalin for 1942: the help of the
U.S. And, as events were to prove, that was to come late and to
be bottlenecked by German attacks on the North Sea route and the
Caucasus.

     With these reduced resources, Stalin tackled his problem,
trying to pick abler leaders for his Army, trying to improve its
resistance, trying to maintain the morale of his underfed people,
trying to extract more aid from his Allies and to get them to
open a second front.

     Only Stalin knows how he managed to make 1942 a better year
for Russia than 1941. But he did. Sevastopol was lost, the Don
basin was nearly lost, the Germans reached the Caucasus. But
Stalingrad was held. The Russian people held. The Russian Army
came back with four offensives that had the Germans in serious
trouble at year's end.

     Russia was displaying greater strength than at any point in
the war. The general who had won that overall battle was the man
who runs Russia.

     The Man. In his birch-paneled office within the dark-towered
Kremlin, Joseph Stalin (pronounced Stal-yn), an imponderable,
soberly persistent Asiatic, worked at his desk 16 to 18 hours a
day. Before him he kept a huge globe showing the course of
campaigns over territory he himself defended in the civil wars of
1917-20. This time he again defended it, and mostly by will
power. There were new streaks of grey in his hair and new
etchings of fatigue in his granite face. (Stalin was 63 on Dec.
21, a date not recorded in the Soviet Encyclopedia and not
mentioned in the Soviet press for the past three years.) But
there was no break in his hold on Russia and there was long-
neglected recognition of his abilities by nations outside the
Soviet borders.

     The problem for Stalin the statesman was to present the
seriousness of the plight of Russia as an ally to Western leaders
long suspicious of Stalin and his workers' State. Stalin, who had
every reason to expect the city named for him to fall shortly
after its heroic siege began on Aug. 24, desperately wanted aid
from his allies. Stalin the politician made these desires the
hope of the Russian people. He made them think that a continental
second front had been promised to them, and thereby strengthened
their will to hang on.

     For his armies Stalin coined the slogan Umeraite No Ne
Otstupaite (Die, But Do Not Retreat). It had been shown at Moscow
that a strongly fortified city can be held as a strong point
against attack by mechanized forces. Stalin chose to make
Stalingrad another such point. While Germans and Russians were
booting each other to death in the bomb-pocked streets, Stalin
was organizing the winter offensive which burst into the Don
basin with the fury of the snowstorms that accompanied it.

     To keep his home front intact, Stalin had only work and
black bread to offer. He added a promise of victory in 1942 and
called to his people to sacrifice collectively to preserve the
things they had built collectively. Children and women foraged in
the forests for wood. A ballerina canceled one performance
because she was stiff from chopping wood. Production norms were
increased, apartments went unheated, electricity was turned off
four days a week. At year's end the Russian children had no new
toys for the New Year's celebration. There were no red-cloaked
wooden replicas of Dyed Moross (Granddad Frost). There was no
smoked salmon, no pickled herring, no goose, no vodka, no coffee
for the grownups. But there was rejoicing. The Rodina
(Motherland) had been saved for the second time in two years and
now victory and peace could not be too far off.

     The trek of world dignitaries to Moscow in 1942 brought
Stalin out of his inscrutable shell, revealed a pleasant host and
an expert at playing his cards in international affairs. At
banquets for such men as Winston Churchill, W. Averill Harriman
and Wendell Willkie, Host Stalin drank his vodka straight, talked
the same way. He sent Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov to
London and Washington to promote the second front and jack up
laggard shipments of war materiel. In two letters to Henry
Cassidy of the A.P., Stalin shrewdly used the world's headlines
to state the Russian case for more aid.

     Stalin did not get his continental second front in 1942, but
when a new front was opened in North Africa he publicly approved.
On the 25th anniversary of the Bolshevist Revolution, Stalin, in
his big state speech of the year, reviewed the past and for the
future struck the note of statesmanship.

     The Past. The Revolution that was begun in 1917 by a handful
of leather-coated working men and pallid intellectuals waving the
red flag, by 1942 had congealed into a party government that has
remained in power longer than any other major party in the world.
It began under the leadership of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, on
Marxist principles of a moneyless economy which challenged the
right to accumulate wealth by private initiative.

     The world reviled and caricatured the early Bolsheviks as
bush-whiskered anarchists with a bomb in each hand. But Lenin,
faced with hard facts and a war-beaten, superstitious, illiterate
people, compromised with Marxism. Stalin, succeeding him,
compromised still further, concentrated on building socialism in
one state. Retained through the years of Russia's great upheaval
was the basic conception that the ownership and operation of the
means of production must be kept in the hands of the state.

     Within Russia's immense disorderliness, Stalin faced the
fundamental problems of providing enough food for the people and
improving their lot, through 20th-Century industrial methods. He
collectivized the farms and he built Russia into one of the four
great industrial powers on earth. How well he succeeded was
evident in Russia's world-surprising strength in World War II.
Stalin's methods were tough, but they paid off.

     The Present. The U.S., of all nations, should have been the
first to understand Russia. Ignorance of Russia and suspicion of
Stalin were two things that prevented it. Old prejudices and the
antics of U.S. communists dangling at the end of the Party line
were others. As Allies fighting the common enemy, the Russians
have fought the best fight so far. As post-war collaborators,
they hold many of the keys to a successful peace.

     The two peoples who talk the most and scheme the biggest
schemes are the Americans and the Russians. Both can be
sentimental one moment, blazingly angry the next. Both spend
their money freely for goods and pleasures, drink too much, argue
interminably. Both are builders. The U.S. built mills and
factories and tamed the land across a continent 3,000 miles wide.
Russia tried to catch up by doing the same thing through a
planned program that post-pioneer Americans would not have
suffered. The rights as individuals that U.S. citizens have, the
Russians want and believe they eventually will receive. Some of
the discipline that the Russians have, the U.S. may need before
the end of World War II.

     The Future. In his 25th-anniversary speech Stalin emphasized
that the most important event in foreign affairs, both for war
and peace, was Allied collaboration. "We have the facts and
events," he said, "pointing to a progressive rapprochement among
the members of the Anglo-Soviet-American coalition and their
uniting in a single fighting alliance." This was a frank approach
to the post-war world, as realistically sensible as Stalin's
expressed ideas on dealings with Germany. "Our aim," he said, "is
not to destroy all armed force in Germany, because any
intelligent man will understand that this is as impossible in the
case of Germany as in the case of Russia. It would be
unreasonable on the part of the victor to do so. To destroy
Hitler's army is possible and necessary."

     What other war aims Stalin has are not officially known, but
there are reports in high circles that he wants no new
territories except at points needed to make Russia impregnable
against invasion. There is also a story in high places that, in
keeping with the "tough-guy" tradition, credits Stalin with one
other desire: permission from his allies to raze Berlin, as a
lesson in psychology to the Germans and as a burnt offering to
his own heroic people.