This was, as I have noted, a period of danger. The bipartisan approach broke down completely over Suez. When Sir Anthony Eden ordered intervention in Egypt the danger was real but indistinct. It was also a long-term economic danger arising from threat to the country's oil supplies rather than the immediate military danger represented by the Soviet Union's military strength in East Germany and elsewhere in Central Europe accompanied by Russian diplomacy and subversion. Russian military power already had won its foothold in Egypt. But the Labor Party refused to regard this power as an immediate threat and consequently rejected it as a reason for the adoption of a bipartisan approach. The British people have never been so violently anti-Russian as the Americans. There is a distinction between anti-Russian and anti-Communist. Communism has had few more bitter opponents than Ernest Bevin or Herbert Morrison, two leaders in the post-war Labor government. They represented elements of the movement which for decades had been fighting in the unions and in the constituency parties to prevent the Communists from winning control of the Trades Union Congress and the Labor Party. But neither the leaders nor the led could be called anti-Russian. The war alliance with the Soviet Union meant far more to Britons than the military co-operation between the Soviet Union and the United States during the same period meant to Americans. The British attitude was rooted in the situation of June 1941 when the Germans turned east and attacked the Soviet Union. The British had then been fighting the Germans and the Italians single-handed for a year. Their cities had been bombed, their armies and navies grievously punished in France, Norway, Libya, and Greece. Each month the German submarines in the North Atlantic were bolder and more numerous and the toll of shipping losses was higher. Most Britons knew they had stout friends in the United States, but the wiser also recognized the strength of isolationist sentiment. And, although American industrial mobilization was gaining momentum, that would not avert another Coventry tonight or another Dunkirk tomorrow. Suddenly all this altered. Russia, which had sided with Germany for two years and had gobbled up parts of Finland, Poland, and Romania as her reward, was invaded. Overnight the British became willing to overlook the despicable role Russia had played in the first two years of the war. Here, at last, was an ally. An ally, moreover, that fought, that was undergoing the same punishment Britain had known.