GERMAN BREAK-THROUGH NEAR SEDAN. Tragically, there’s no doubt now that earlier Nazi claims are true -- the Germans have torn open a sixty-two-mile gap in the defensive lines of northern France after ferocious fighting. George Axelsson writes in Saturday’s New York Times that the wedge stretches from “south of Maubeuge to Carignán, southeast of Sedan.” Hitler’s armies are pouring huge tanks supported by low-flying bombers into the gap, say radio bulletins this morning. The radio also reports new German claims that advanced armored units have raced all the way to the outskirts of Rheims, about seventy-five miles from Paris. Some of the Nazis’ fifty divisions poured into the attack appear to be headed south-westward toward Paris, others westward toward the Channel ports. The Associated Press has a story Saturday describing the Germans’ new tanks, “larger and more heavily armed than those which rolled through Poland last September.” Three armored corps, each with 400 of these monsters, are fighting now in the “Meuse salient.”
“GRAVE, BUT NOT DESPERATE.” Ralph Barnes writes in Saturday’s New York Herald Tribune that the Allied retreat is “developing into a rout and debacle,” but he’s quoting claims from German sources. (Oddly, the Washington Post reprint of Mr. Barnes’ story is edited to make the “rout and debacle” remark look more like the reporter’s own judgement). Some statements right now from the Allies themselves are less than reassuring -- I just heard one radio report quoting France’s Premier Reynaud as calling the situation “grave, but it is by no means desperate.”
Saturday’s Herald Tribune also has a reassuring front-page map showing how much more ground the Germans have to cover before they reach the lines of their 1914 advance. But the Nazis have advanced some twelve to fourteen miles into France in the last twenty-four hours, and thirty miles the day before that, the radio says. One starts to wonder, I suppose the way people did in the first anxious months of the World War, just where will be German advance be stopped? And when? It will be stopped, won’t it?
HITLER’S TROOPS TAKE ANTWERP, BRUSSELS. It hasn’t been stopped yet in Belgium, either, where fierce German armor and air attacks on the “Dyle line” have forced what the British War Office calls a “readjustment” westward of the Allied defenses in Belgium. Sigrid Schultz writes in Saturday’s Chicago Tribune that the British have also abandoned Brussels and the university city of Louvain. (Just the day before, Harold Denny wrote in the New York Times of a blistering British assault that had driven momentarily thrown the Germans out of Louvain, despite “terrific attacks” by the Nazis along the whole of the Belgian line.). The Nazis are in Antwerp this morning, after that city’s British and Belgian defenders were flanked by the German seizure of Brussels. Saturday’s Times says the Belgians have moved their capital to the North Sea coastal city of Ostend.
William Shirer noted in his C.B.S. broadcast from Berlin yesterday morning that in 1914 it took the Germans sixteen days to take Brussels, and this time it only took eight. The Germans were boasting Saturday that they’ll be in Paris in another two weeks.
IS THERE HOPE FOR THE ALLIES? If you scour the front pages looking for anything resembling good news on the war, you can find a few tidbits. Saturday’s papers all carry French General Gamelin’s stirring, defiant order of the day (“The watchword today is ‘Conquer or die.’ We must conquer.”) The Associated Press reports Saturday that the French army “unleashed furious counter-attacks today, seeking to draw a hangman’s knot about the ponderous advance of heavy German tanks into northern France.” The New York Herald Tribune’s Edward Angly, traveling with the British Army in Belgium, writes that French officers “seemed serenely confident that the situation in this region today was well in hand....The general feeling was that in his own time and in his own way Gen. Gamelin would take whatever measures were needed to call a halt to the admitted advance of the enemy.”
And one radio report today says that British military men are “heartened” by reports that the German advance is slowing down.
ROOSEVELT CALLS FOR 50,000-PLANE AIR FORCE. The best thing that’s come out of the German offensive is a new, bipartisan determination in the U.S. to make America invulnerable to a Nazi-style lightning attack. President Roosevelt’s emergency arms message to Congress Thursday was one of his best speeches in quite some time, and seems to have done the trick. The President proposed an additional expenditure this year of $1,182,00,000 for preparedness. According to Saturday’s Washington Post, within twenty-four hours of the speech the Senate Military Appropriations Subcommittee had approved a huge chunk of that, a $732,000,000 emergency fund requested for the Army. The subcommittee even threw in an extra $50,000,000 beyond the administration’s request.
John G. Norris reports in Friday’s Post that the President also declared one eye-popping “ultimate objective” for the nation’s air force -- “a total of 50,000 Army and Navy planes and an industry capable of turning out a like number annually.” That would be an air armada far surpassing that of any country in the world. The portion of the requested funds allotted for this, however, will only buy 315 warplanes.
Most heartening, though, is what the Post described as “an unprecedented peacetime defense coalition...behind the President with the pledged support of former President Herbert Hoover, former Gov. Alf E. Landon, of Kansas; Col. Frank Knox, Thomas E. Dewey and Republican leaders in Congress.” Wonder of wonders, even the Chicago Tribune’s editors found something to faintly praise -- “Mr. Roosevelt’s message to congress...may be taken as a welcome indication that at last he is awakening to the situation and its dangers.”
IF ITALY GETS INTO THE WAR... Various reports lately have described Mussolini and the controlled fascist press of Italy as sounding increasingly belligerent in the wake of this spring’s German victories. Felix Morley writes in Saturday’s Washington Post of speculation that the Duce might choose to bring Italy into the war on Germany’s side this coming Thursday, May 23, exactly thirty-five years after Italy’s formal entry into the World War. But Barnet Nover writes in his Post column that Italy’s decision would likely be far-reaching, and potentially catastrophic --
“With Italy in the war, Yugoslavia and Greece and Turkey will be in the war. An Italian move would also probably mean Russian action against Rumania. It would involve Switzerland, for only through possession of the Swiss railroads could there be any truly effective liaison between the axis powers. It would also bring Egypt and the rest of North Africa into the war and whatever Gen. Franco might say about it, Spain, too, would probably become involved.”
Not only would Italy be the match that ignites the Mediterranean tinderbox, says Mr. Nover, but her decision might also have consequences for Japanese aspirations -- “The spread of the European conflict to the Mediterranean would undoubtedly give the more venturesome elements of the Island Empire the urge to carry out the threatened move against the Netherlands East Indies.”
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