FLANDERS BATTLE ALL BUT OVER. This morning, two days after the Belgian surrender, it looks like the Allied pocket in Flanders is starting to fall apart. The morning’s news broadcasts say that British troops are desperately trying to escape via the Allies’ one remaining port of Dunkerque, amid near-constant bombing and shelling. One report says that scattered groups of soldiers are also “sliding off a stretch of coast thirty miles long,” in rowboats and small fishing craft. The goal is to float back to England, one way or another.
William Shirer described in last night’s talk from Berlin on the C.B.S. how the Germans have split the pocket into two pieces, by seizing the French city of Lille Wednesday. One piece south of Lille is a square about twelve miles wide, containing the remains of three French armies, while the other is about twice that size and contains the trapped British troops falling back towards the coastline. Mr. Shirer also lists the Nazi successes reported in just the last twenty-four hours -- the capture of Lille, the taking of one remaining Channel port, Ostend, the storming of Bruges and Ypres and the bombardment of Dunkerque. The headlines are “as amazing to the Germans here at home as they are to you and me,” he says.
The Associated Press reports Wednesday that somewhere on a distant planet, the French high command claims that a new offensive launched from the Somme River to rescue their trapped comrades in the Flanders pocket is “going well.” But every newspaper map I’ve seen shows the pocket shrinking, and the gap between the main French lines and the pocket growing dramatically wider.
ALLIED TROOPS ESCAPING THE TRAP? A story by George Axelsson in Wednesday’s New York Times indicates that in one critical respect, the Allied plight in Flanders might not be as bad as originally feared. A couple of days ago it was widely predicted that all of the trapped British and French forces faced either surrender or annihilation, but Mr. Axelsson reports an amazing number may have already slipped away -- “The Germans think the Allies have succeeded in shipping out over 500,000 men from the pocket during the last few days.” If true, it’s by far the cheeriest news of this grim week. Yet it still leaves, the Times reports, some 30 divisions, comprising 300,000 to 360,000 men, who are making a “desperate last stand” against the attacking Nazis.
Can these men get out as well? The Times story doesn’t discuss their chances, but a much gloomier article by Edward Angly in Wednesday’s New York Herald Tribune all but writes them off -- “In this epic tragedy the port of Dunkerque was the only hope of escape, and Dunkerque was under such brutal bombing by the numerically superior airmen of Germany that the prospect of removing the French-British force in the north was considered in London to be remote.” An Associated Press story from Wednesday says the peril to Britain’s expeditionary force is “not even exceeded by that of the British in the disaster at Gallipoli in the world war.” That peril is much greater now that the Belgians, who were holding the left wing of the front, have quit fighting at King Leopold’s order.
“KING QUISLING” MAY GET A NEW THRONE. Not every Belgian is following King Leopold’s surrender orders, however. His cabinet, now in Paris, has declared his capitulation “illegal” and plans to raise a new army in exile, according to Walter Kerr in Wednesday’s New York Herald Tribune. Neither is the King well regarded now in Britain or France. An Associated Press story recounts a violent argument between Leopold and General Weygand shortly before the surrender was announced, and Britain’s Evening Standard lampooned the monarch the other day with the title of “King Quisling.”
Not surprisingly, though, his capitulation won high praise from Berlin and Rome. And E.R. Noderer writes in Wednesday’s Chicago Tribune that the Nazis may be prepared to give the King more than kind words. They’ve assigned him to a “well known” Belgian castle, there to remain until they decide what to do with him. Mr. Noderer adds that “Leopold has always been considered by the Germans as sympathetic to the Nazi cause. Now, after his surrender, many believe Hitler not only will treat him with the greatest courtesy, but that he will grant Leopold a certain amount of political influence” -- perhaps as the puppet sovereign of a new, Nazi-supervised Flemish-Dutch kingdom.
AMERICAN WAR JITTERS. The current issue of Time magazine jots a number of examples of U.S. war worries from all over the nation --
“In Jeanette, Pa., a gun club got ready to pot any Nazi parachutists descending from the skies; the Pennsylvania legislature studied ways to protect industrial plants from air raids; in Brooklyn a war-crazed British sailor danced despairingly on a high window ledge; in Manhattan and Seattle, two men killed themselves because of news; in Kirkland, Wash., a lady letter-writer noted approvingly that a coffee shop had changed ‘hamburger’ on the menu to ‘liberty steak.’”
On the other hand, says Time, “City College students paraded in Manhattan, protesting war and the R.O.T.C.; 1,000 Dartmouth students wired the President to keep the U.S. out of war; Temple University’s student chiefs telegraphed a plea to calm ‘war hysteria.’”
NEXT TARGET – LONDON OR PARIS? Now that, barring a major miracle, the Germans have decisively won the Battle of Flanders, there’s all sorts of speculation in Wednesday’s papers about just where the Nazi war machine will head next. Sigrid Schultz reports in the Chicago Tribune that many Germans are convinced “Fuehrer Hitler’s next move will be against Paris -- ‘to increase the panic in France,’ it was said. This conviction was based on the belief here that the morale of the population in France is nearer the breaking point than in England.” By contrast, according to Ralph Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune, “The implication of all the Nazi commentaries is that Fuehrer Adolph Hitler now has given the order for the invasion of Great Britain, his arch-enemy.” Jubilant Nazis now say “the gates to England are open” following the Belgian surrender.
Meanwhile, in the Washington Post Felix Morley acknowledges German claims that an invasion of Britain is in the offing, and says “it is readily understandable that the Germans should want to create this impression.” For one thing, it might talk the British out of sending new reinforcements to Paris. But Mr. Morley also smartly looks at what Hitler wrote years ago in Mein Kampf, given that the Fuehrer’s book has been a fairly reliable guide to his subsequent schemes. And Mr. Morley notes that Hitler’s book condemns France, not Britain, as the eternal enemy of the German people. Hence, “it is at France rather than Britain that he may be expected to strike a deadly blow if opportunity serves.”
THE WAR WILL BE DECIDED IN FRANCE. Barnet Nover also discounts the idea of an immediate Nazi invasion of Britain, in his Washington Post column on Wednesday –
“It has been predicted...that once in possession of the Channel ports Hitler will let France alone and concentrate the force of the German attack solely on England. But even under existing circumstances an attack on England would probably prove no easy venture and would certainly involve a vast German expenditure of men and material. Indeed, an attack on England, whether in the form of actual invasion or continuous bombardment from the air, would have no purpose if it did not lead to the weakening of the French army by cutting off essential supplies and reinforcements from Britain to France. In that connection it is obviously in the German interest to have the British thoroughly alarmed over the possibility of an invasion and thus allocate to home defense men and supplies needed by the Allied forces on the continent. But whatever happens in England the war will probably be won – and lost -- in France.”
IT’S EITHER THE “WAR OF 1940" OR THE “WAR OF 1945.” Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, makes the case for massive U.S. aid to the Allies in an opinion piece in Tuesday’s New York Times –
“If the Allies fail then the Germans are no longer at Saint Quentin and the Channel but at our own gates flushed with victory, using as their partner every predatory force existing in every part of the world. Speaking very realistically it is cheaper in blood and money to help others to fight the war of 1940 than to fight the war of 1945 ourselves, alone. Though I am not a military critic I have confidence the French and British can hold the gates. But for them to continue to hold them, for them to mass the power for final victory, they need our money, our planes, our supplies, our encouragement, our admiration, our love.”
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