ALLIES MOVE FORWARD IN NORWAY. Associated Press reporter Thomas F. Hawkins serves up some good news in Monday's papers about the fighting in Norway. Allied troops, both British and French, are battling the Germans “from north of Trondheim on the west coast almost to the Swedish border north of Oslo.” Norwegian diplomatic sources are seconding British claims that Hamar, 40 miles from Sweden and 60 miles north of Oslo, has been retaken by British and Norwegian soldiers supported by tanks. It's said that the Allies have retaken Elverum, which was seized by advancing Germans only a couple of days ago. A French division has landed 100 miles north of Trondheim, at Namsos. Heavy fighting is reported within 35 miles of Trondheim, at the coastal town of Verdalsora.
There's growing confidence in Britain that the Allies will score “sensational successes” in the Norwegian campaign, writes Larry Rue from London for Monday's Chicago Tribune. London's Daily Mail hailed the British capture of Hamar as a "magnificent piece of strategy, outrivalling anything of the Germans." Mr. Rue also says that “The Tribune correspondent was told to bet his ‘bottom dollar’ that every German in Norway would be dead or have surrendered before May 15. The bet was not taken, but the correspondent merely mentions this as symptomatic of the hopes of those supposedly ‘in the know.’”
FRANCE AND BRITAIN WARN ITALY. France and Britain have drawn a line in southeastern Europe, writes Ralph Heinzen in a Monday dispatch for the United Press. The Allies have told Mussolini officially that “they will not tolerate the slightest change in the Mediterranean status quo, including the Adriatic, and that they could not continue to recognize [Italy] as a nonbelligerent if the Fascist state occupied any part of Yugoslavia, even in the guise of ‘preventative’ or ‘protective’ occupation.” This follows a period in which Italy’s press has been “furiously hostile” toward Britain, and rumors have swept Balkan capitals of an imminent Italian push against the Yugoslavs. Ominously, Fascist leaders have also “warned the Italian people to be ready to fight and have hinted that Italy may enter the war soon.”
So much for all that talk in March about Italy being so put off by Russo-German cooperation that she might ditch the Rome-Berlin Axis entirely. No such luck, apparently.
CAN ITALY FIGHT? Not well and not for long, according to Walter Lippmann’s column in last Saturday’s New York Herald Tribune --
“The weakness of Italy’s position is manifest and is freely recognized by all clear-headed Italians. Italy has no coal and no oil and no steel, and only an insignificant part of Italy’s requirements could be supplied overland from Germany; the Italian peninsula is for all intents and purposes an island and, therefore, absolutely vulnerable to a blockade. The Italian Empire consists of Abyssinia, which can be cut off at Suez; of Libya, which lies between the French armies at Tunis and the British armies in Egypt. As a belligerent Italy would be fighting in the Mediterranean against France, Britain, and Turkey. For Italy to enter the war before Hitler has struck a really deadly blow at the Allies would, therefore, appear to be suicidal madness, and that is exactly what most Italians think it would be.”
Mussolini’s dilemma, Mr. Lippmann writes, is that “if Hitler is going to win the war, it is no less dangerous for Italy to stay out of the war. A victorious Nazi Germany would not fail to resent fiercely the fact that...Italy had not fulfilled her pledges.” Thus, the Italians face a difficult balancing act -- “[Italy’s] only chance to save anything from this desperate situation is to join the Germans if they are winning, to join them before it is too late to contribute anything important to the Nazi victory, yet not too soon to be fatally hurt by the Allies.”
HITLER’S NEXT TARGET - THE BALKANS? John Elliott writes from Paris for Sunday’s New York Herald Tribune that French observers now see the Balkans as potentially the hottest spot on the European “volcano,” and that the Yugoslavs might face danger from Hitler as well as from Mussolini --
“Yugoslavia appears particularly threatened. German troop concentrations are reported along the southern frontier of Austria. At the same time the presence of thousands of Nazi ‘tourists’ has been observed in Yugoslavia, Rumania, and Hungary. Last summer, it will be recalled, Danzig was flooded similarly with visiting Nazis a short time before the Germans invaded the Polish Corridor and the Free City.”
WHAT OF DENMARK’S “ORPHAN” TERRITORIES? The day that Nazi troops occupied Denmark, the Allies and the U.S. worried over what would happen to the Danes’ western territories -- Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands, some 200 miles north of Scotland. The British moved quickly, putting troops ashore on the thinly-populated Faroes. But the U.S. is much more worried about what will happen to Iceland and Greenland, also small in population and almost undefended -- and offering strategic advantages to any possessor. The current Newsweek describes why Americans care what happens to these two islands --
“Greenland at least falls within the Western Hemisphere and therefore within the scope of the Monroe Doctrine....William Seward, Secretary of State under Lincoln and Johnson, when negotiating for the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867, urged that the United States buy Greenland and Iceland, too, to assure this country control of the North Atlantic. Sen. Ernest Lundeen, Minnesota Farmer-Laborite, long has advocated acquisition of foreign possessions in this hemisphere. Last week there were calls from Capitol Hill for the placing of the two strategic islands under the joint jurisdiction of Canada and the United States.
Iceland, whose population of 117,000 was self-governing but officially under the rule of Denmark’s king, assumed full independence the day after the Nazis conquered the Danes. But the Icelanders have no army, navy, or air force, and only about a hundred police. And last year they were visited by a “scientific expedition” from Germany -- which included warships.
WHEN NAZIS INVADE, TRAITORS HELP. “Europe is looking the Trojan Horse in the mouth this week-end,” writes James B. Reston in Sunday’s New York Times. He neatly sums up the Nazi record on subversion to describe why Europeans are suddenly so alarmed by this --
“In 1938 Austria was conquered from within with Dr. Arthur Seyss-Inquart acting as the Fuehrer’s Charlie McCarthy. In 1939 it was Konrad Heinlein and his following who undermined Czecho-Slovakia, and it was those same German ‘commercial travelers’ who started the Czech riots. But in neither of those countries was the technique of the Trojan Horse, applied so successfully as it was in Norway last week when, by lies, bribery, bluff, faked telegrams and carefully planned and perfectly timed sabotage, 2,000 Nazis took Oslo and a few thousand others marched into the undermined ports of Narvik, Trondheim, Bergen and Stavanger.”
Mr. Reston adds that because of those tactics -- first disclosed by U.S. newspapermen -- Europe is now in a state of alarm. “Every man with a German accent or pro-German sentiments is a suspect....Every country is calling its roll of aliens. All the nations, especially the liberal democracies, are guarding their ports, protecting their valuable areas and planning every manner of new defense.”
DEMOCRATS HAVE SLIGHT ADVANTAGE. Dr. Gallup has completed his state-by-state surveys of how the two political parties match up in the 1940 presidential campaign. And according to his report in Sunday’s Washington Post, the Democrats have the lead. No surprise there, but Dr. Gallup adds that the Republicans are actually in a better position than they’ve been in many years.
Right now, the Democrats lead in 31 states having 317 electoral votes, while the G.O.P. leads only in 17 states with 214 electoral votes. But, the pollster adds, “the Democratic lead in several states is so slim -- notably in New York and Minnesota -- that a shift of only 1 percentage point would completely alter the picture and throw a majority of electoral votes to the G.O.P. Political observers will have to go back to the Wilson-Hughes race of 1916 to find an election where the two parties proved to be so evenly matched in popular strength.”
Sounds like a young crime-busting Republican, popular with the party rank-and-file, and who has demonstrated an ability in the primaries to draw votes, just could be the man to get that extra percentage point. Are you listening, party leaders? Will you give up your puzzling dedication to Senator Taft and help Thomas E. Dewey get the nomination?
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