Books: The Siberian Bastion

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In 1941 the icebreaker Krassin smashed out a 6,000-mile Arctic sea route (Arch-angel-to-Seattle) between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This northern sea route is now open only three to five months of the year. But new freighters of 10,000 tons are being built and "super icebreakers" of 50,000 horsepower and 24,000 tons are projected.

Siberia's Far East extends 3,450 air miles. Its coastline is nearly twice that long. The Manchukuoan frontier alone is as long as Europe's Eastern Front. The Trans-Siberian railroad has been double-tracked all the way to Vladivostok, but is extremely vulnerable. If it were cut, the chief cities — Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, Komsomolsk—would be isolated. Further north two new lines are being rushed. Biggest industrial enterprise in the Far East is the Chapcherginsk Tin Combinat, which produces 65% of all Soviet tin. No. 1 industrial center is Komsomolsk, where the Amur Steel Works turn out more than 750,000 tons of finished steel products per year.

Military Strength in the Far East is anybody's guess. Authors Davies & Steiger believe that half the Russian air force is held there, that the Far Eastern Red Army has not been appreciably drained for war in the west. Naval information is even vaguer than military, but in 1939 Russia's Pacific Fleet was reported to consist of 18 destroyers, 90 submarines, 80 coastal motorboats, 32 gunboats, 75 mosquito boats.

If Japan were to hold the Soviet Coast and the Chukot Peninsula, opposite Alaska, she would dominate the North Pacific, and Alaska would be impotent. Meanwhile the Allies hold both jaws of the pincers; the authors urge that they use them.

Few items in this Siberian inventory will surprise U.S. readers more than the report of large oilfields in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. If true, the real defensibility of the Siberian bastion may well depend on those fields. For it is generally believed that 85% of Russia's oil is in the Caucasus fields; that if the Germans conquer this oil even the Siberian military, industrial and agricultural machine will break down.

The Literary Life

Man With a Hoe. Ambrose Bierce once told Edwin Markham that The Man with the Hoe would one day kill him. Instead the poem made Poet Markham $250,000 before he died (of natural causes) at 87. It also made him the idol of a small army of would-be biographers who have besieged Son Virgil Markham, a mystery writer, for the privilege of writing the poet's life. Each claimed that Poet Markham had authorized him to write his official biography.

Among the claimants Virgil Markham counted two literary scholars, a college student, two feminine "appreciators," a former collaborator and "rabid admirer." Most persistent was Mrs. Florence Hamilton, of Wellesley Hills, Mass., with whom Virgil Markham has exchanged subacid letters in the New York Times. Mrs. Hamilton not only claims that Poet Markham authorized her to write The Intellectual Biography of Edwin Markham. She also claims that she possesses the original manuscript of The Man With the Hoe. Another "original" was bought by a private dealer for $700 several years ago. Virgil Markham owns a third "original."

Woman with a Hoe. Every few weeks somebody in the U.S. wonders what Gertrude Stein is doing.