HOLLAND SURRENDERS TO THE GERMANS. After five days of resistance, the Netherlands has been knocked out of the war. A United Press account says the Dutch commander in chief, Henri Gerard Winkelman, asked his troops to lay down their arms “to prevent further bloodshed and annihilation.” Dutch troops and sailors are still giving battle in the southwestern coastal province of Zeeland, and Holland’s overseas empire has pledged to continue the fight. Queen Wilhelmina says that her country’s state of war with Germany continues. But not in Rotterdam, Utrecht, Helden, or other Dutch cities shattered by raids from Nazi dive-bombers since last Friday. According to the Associated Press account, “the Germans had forced the surrender of Rotterdam by furious bombing which had set afire a large part of that great seaport city.”
Radio reports this morning quote the Dutch foreign minister in Paris as estimating his country’s losses at 100,000 troops, or one-quarter of the entire Dutch Army -- a staggering figure if true.
TITANIC BATTLE IN BELGIUM. This morning’s bulletins estimate a total of three million Allied and German troops are now fighting for Belgium. The front page of Wednesday’s New York Times has a useful map giving the clearest indication I’ve seen so far of just where the battle lines are, or were as of yesterday. It runs in a fairly straight line through Belgium, from east of Antwerp down to Louvain and then to Namur and Sedan.
The fighting at the south end of this line on the French border is the most critical. Here, according to G.H. Archambault in Wednesday’s Times, the Germans are trying to breach the Maginot Line with a fierce assault directed at the Meuse River valley between Sedan and the small town of Longwy farther east. A German armored force “accompanied by a swarm of low-flying planes” fought for and took Sedan, which Mr. Archambault emphasizes “stands north of the Maginot Line.” The Nazis have also taken about three-forths of Longwy after bitter campaigning, and have launched attacks also between Longwy and Montmedy. The Associated Press account calls the Meuse River valley “history’s tried and trampled path of invasion,” and says the battle now going on there “may prove the decisive turning point of the war.”
Back in Belgium, another radio report says that the Germans have entered Louvain, a famous university city now reduced to rubble by air and artillery bombardments, but that British forces have stopped the German advance eighteen miles west of Brussels. For now.
IT’S 1914 ALL OVER AGAIN. William Shirer gave a very interesting and descriptive talk on the C.B.S. last night about Germany’s use of the World War “Schlieffen Plan” in her current campaign. He says the Reich press confirmed Wednesday that their army is using a modified version of the plan, which calls for a “swing-door” movement of troops through northern Belgium, then turning left in a large circle past Brussels and toward the French border, outflanking the French forces and trapping them between Paris and the Rhine. A thrust could come at the “top” of the door toward Antwerp, Mr. Shirer reports, or it could come -- as it appears to be now -- with more pressure directed at Sedan.
George Axelsson of the New York Times notes some 1914 similarities in a Tuesday story, such as the battle for Liege, which in 1914 fell to German strategic initiative and new weaponry -- back then, it was the new heavy howitzers. He also anticipates a large battle for Antwerp. It’s for all of this, Mr. Axelsson writes, that the conflict is “beginning to be called a second installment of the World War.”
NEXT STOP -- ANTWERP? Napoleon once called the Belgian port city of Antwerp “a dagger aimed at the heart of England.” Sigrid Schultz quotes this in her Chicago Tribune story on Wednesday, where she identifies several locales as being the “real heart” of Hitler’s objectives for the current offensive. Miss Schultz also mentions Rotterdam, now in Nazi hands, as being only 188 miles from London, “an easy two hour round trip for a bombing plane.” Above all, the French seaport of Calais is a mere 22 miles from British soil and would be another ideal base for an all-out air and submarine attack on Britain, says the Tribune. If that is the case then it would be expected that the main force of the German armies now in Belgium and Holland would drive west-southwestward, instead of due south, toward Paris.
A COALITION GOVERNMENT FOR THE U.S.? Writing from Paris, Dorothy Thompson lets loose a whale of a proposal in her New York Herald Tribune column on Wednesday. She notes that “the gravity of this hour cannot possibly be overstated,” and that the Nazis are trying to force a decision in the war just when the United States is “politically immobilized” and least able to act decisively. Because of this, Miss Thompson suggests that the Republican Party concede the presidential election this year --
“The greatest thing, it seems to me, that the Republican Party could do now for the Nation it has served so often and so magnificently would be to announce, and as quickly as possible, that if the President will accept a third term it will offer no candidate in opposition to him, but will offer, instead, only a Vice Presidential candidate. And...in the interests of the Nation, it might look elsewhere than in the traditional places for a Vice Presidential candidate, and nominate, for Vice President, Wendell Willkie, one of our ablest citizens, a man who most thoroughly represents the most enlightened and modern wing of Republican opinion, who is 100 per cent with Secretary Hull on foreign policy and who, were a change at this time desirable for all, is certainly Presidential timber....The election of Roosevelt plus a Republican ticket would presume a reorganization of the Cabinet to include Republicans – in other words, a Government of national concentration. And I personally believe that ticket would win.”
It’s hard to imagine it really happening, but Miss Thompson’s motives for putting the idea forward deserve a salute -- “From Paris, where one sees events moving with the swiftness of a motorized battalion...it is impossible to think of one’s self as a Republican or a Democrat, or a Socialist or a New Dealer. One thinks of one’s self only as a citizen of the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
AIR POWER WILL WIN THE WAR. This week’s issue of Time magazine quotes a recent commentary in the London Observer by J.L. Garvin, who makes a critical point about the fighting still to come. It’s also startling to note that Mr. Garvin wrote these words before the current Nazi offensive began --
“Britain and France have to fight not only for their own liberties but for their lives. They have to wage that fight and win it during the next few months. It may well be, and it is very likely to be, the most desperate struggle that the world has seen....The Nazis are full of vehement confidence....They are flushed with unlimited dreams of destruction and triumph. They mean to make a giant bid for complete victory by next autumn. The Allies have to meet the full shock of this temper before they can begin to smash it. But they cannot smash it until they possess complete and overwhelming predominance of the flying arm...The truth and force of that view ought to have been brought home to practical imagination long ago by the Polish Blitzkrieg. By the new lessons in Norway the case is proved up to the hilt....The Allied cause demands nothing less than an air supremacy of two to one.”
CHURCHILL IN HIS OWN WORDS. For anyone who didn’t hear Prime Minister Churchill’s brief speech on the radio the other day, here’s the most poignant part of what he said, taken from the transcription in Tuesday’s New York Times. May his government live up to the spirit of these noble remarks --
“I say to the House as I said to ministers who have joined this government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many months of struggle and suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I say it is to wage war by land, sea, and air. War with all our might and with all the strength God has given us, and to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. Victory at all costs. Victory in spite of all terrors. Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.”
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