DECISIVE HOURS IN FLANDERS. The battle in northern France and Belgium has taken on a depressing pattern. We hear on the radio that the Allies are “counter-attacking,” and that British or French troops have “stopped” the Germans. Then a couple of days go by...and we find out the Nazis have advanced another twenty or thirty miles.
It’s happened again. The banner headline in last Thursday’s Washington Post read, “Allies Halt Channel Drive,” and the radio was full of reports that the Germans had been thrown out of Abbeville and Arras. Well, apparently that didn’t bother the Nazis too much, because the Saturday papers say they’ve turned north from Abbeville and are now racing up the Channel coastline. According to Frank R. Kelley in the New York Herald Tribune, the British now say they’ve “temporarily” retreated from the major port of Boulogne after ferocious air and ground fighting.
Mr. Kelley also writes that “tonight the Germans said they were ‘at Calais,’ half an hour north of Boulogne, and the British did not deny it.” The French denied on Saturday that Boulogne had fallen, but the radio this morning quotes an official French spokesman as saying the situation there is “confused.” What’s clear now, on the other hand, is what the German Army is up to. The pouring of fresh troops and tanks into the coastal attack is coming dangerously close to cutting the Allied armies in Belgium off from the Channel ports. Thus, as Sigrid Schultz writes in the Chicago Tribune, the Germans are “drawing tighter the noose of steel, fire, and death” around the Allied armies in the French-Belgian pocket.
THE ARMIES IN THE “POCKET.” William Shirer said in his C.B.S. broadcast from Berlin last night that the Germans now jubilantly believe they have the “cream of the Allies armies” trapped in Belgium and northern France. Nazi sources estimate these Allied forces at more than a million -- 400,000 Belgians, 500,000 French, 200,000 British. What’s more, the Germans are optimistic that these units include the best forces of the French Army and a large part of the mechanized British Expeditionary Force. If this is even half-true, the loss of these troops and material would be an unbelievable disaster for the Allies.
HOPE FOR A FRENCH BREAK-THROUGH. But then, there’s still at least a chance that the Nazis might get trapped themselves. G.H. Archambault writes in Saturday’s New York Times that Allied are counter-attacking along the narrow “neck” of the German salient connecting the main Nazi armies with the tank units racing up the coastline. French troops are driving northward along the Somme River from Amiens and Peronne, while Allied fighters on the north side of the “neck” have attacked southward from Bapaume and Cambrai. The United Press reports from Paris that these attacks have closed the gap separating the pocket from the body of France by one-third, from thirty miles to twenty miles.
Mr. Archambault adds that “if the gap is closed, French military spokesmen said, between 20,000 and 30,000 Nazi troops and 1,000 tanks and other armored units will be caught in a trap along the Channel, where Chancellor Hitler is gambling to obtain a foothold for his threatened blitzkrieg against the British Isles.” Thus, bridging that twenty miles in Flanders might change the whole complexion of the war. But can it be done?
HITLER’S REAL “SECRET WEAPON.” Dorothy Thompson writes in Friday’s New York Herald Tribune that the Nazis are indeed using a new kind of warfare against Britain and France --
“Hitler’s secret weapon is not a thermite bomb or a surface detonator. It is bacteria, all right, but new bacteria: The germs of defeatism. It is his knowledge of the deadly slowness, the childlike credulity, and easy-going complacency of democracies and their apparent incapacity, in the twentieth century, to take an audacious decision in time. Hitler won his first war against the German republic and observed then that the characteristic of democracies is that they wake up too late.”
AID THE ALLIES NOW. Miss Thompson also writes in Friday’s New York Herald Tribune that an Allied defeat would be “the worst catastrophe for the United States in our whole history.” I wish that were mere propaganda or hyperbole, but she sketches convincingly what would likely happen following a German victory. A Nazi-dominated Europe would detach South America from North America, since the South American countries market most of their goods to Europe, not to the United States. The loss of European markets would also greatly lower living standards in the U.S., causing a sharp rise in unemployment and thus, much social unrest. And Fifth Columnists would exploit those divisions here in dangerous ways. In the end, says Miss Thompson, America would become “another Spain.” All without a shot being fired. Piling up armaments to defend the forty-eight states won’t rescue us from this. We need to send war materials to the Allies -- as soon as possible, and in massive amounts.
AN END TO LIBERTY? The Chicago Tribune worries, not very convincingly, that if we stand up to dictatorship abroad we’ll end up losing our freedom. They point to the drastic new enabling law passed the other day in Britain --
“The British parliament, at the demand of Mr. Churchill’s combination government, adopted what is called a Hitler government to fight Hitler. The bill...was the law of Great Britain in about three hours....All persons and all property are given to the government for disposal as needed. The people of Britain, in this hour of extremity, will do -- and probably willingly -- what each is told to do. Labor, services, and possessions all may be conscripted. If a house is needed it is taken....The English have abandoned the charter of 1215 in order to avoid, if they can, the experience of 1066. They have gone back to the feudal forms set up by William after the conquest and, in effect, they again hold everything as of the King. Their property rights are in his name and their services might be required by him....War, it should be understood, even without the imminent dangers threatening Great Britain, might easily bring to the United States over night just the thing which is now supreme in the land where our liberties had their political origin.”
No doubt Chamberlain felt the same way two years ago -- that risking war was the very worst of alternatives and must be avoided at all cost. Yet it’s precisely because he stipulated his policies on this mistaken belief that Britain is now having to sacrifice her freedoms today, just for the hope of staying alive.
A SERMON ON DEMOCRACY. In case you missed it, then by all means seek out a copy of Saturday’s New York Herald Tribune or Washington Post and read Walter Lippmann’s column. It’s a beautifully written and inspiring essay, almost religious in tone, on what the democracies must do to survive. This excerpt doesn’t do it justice --
“There is the question of whether a self-governing people will impose upon itself a self-discipline strong enough to insure its own defense. The question is put to a final and desperate test in Western Europe today and in the Americas it is the question on which depends the future of this hemisphere as a hemisphere of freedom. Liberty without discipline cannot survive. Without order and authority in the spirit of man the free way of life leads through weakness, disorganization, self-indulgence, and moral indifference to the destruction of freedom itself. The tragic ordeal through which the western world is passing was prepared in the long period of easy liberty during which man forgot the elementary truths of human existence....They had become too comfortable and too safe and too sophisticated to believe the first things and the last things which men have been inspired to understand through generations of suffering, and they thought it clever to be cynical, and enlightened to be unbelieving, and sensible to be soft. And so, through suffering they must rediscover these first and last things again, and be purified once more by repentance....The elementary principles of work and sacrifice and duty and the transcendent criteria of truth, justice, and righteousness – and the grace of love and charity – are the things which have made men free. Men can keep their freedom and reconquer it only by these means.”
WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT? Ernest K. Lindley lists the possibilities in Friday’s Washington Post --
“The major possibilities for the next few weeks include these: (1) The miracle which saves the Allied armies on the Continent from destruction; (2) Surrender by France; (3) Surrender by Great Britain; (4) Surrender by both Great Britain and France; (5) The refusal of either France or Great Britain to surrender, even though both may be overrun or bombed into shambles. In other words, their insistence on carrying on the war as world empires even if their home bases become untenable.”
Mr. Lindley adds, “It is conceivable that within weeks the British Isles will become untenable as a base for British sea power. If the British or combined fleets, or what is left of them, in the Atlantic fall back on Canada, we will be all the way into the world struggle, whether or not we declare that we are at war.” But whatever happens, “the United States must become a great arsenal as rapidly as possible” -- and must help the Allies as much as we can.
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