NAZIS SPLIT HOLLAND, CAPTURE LIEGE. So far, all of the fighting in the Low Countries appears to be going Hitler’s way. Radio reports this morning say that Nazi armies have captured Liege, the Belgian fortress which had held out for twelve critical days in the World War. Prior to taking Liege, the Germans had already flanked it on Sunday, driving thirteen miles to the rear of the city. Meanwhile, the Dutch high command has confirmed German claims that an attacking column pierced the Grebbe water defense line Monday, then raced westward to seize a key bridge spanning a major estuary in western Holland. That move effectively cut the Netherlands in two, and severed rail contact between Belgium and the Rotterdam/Amsterdam area. The Dutch government has fled the Hague, and Queen Wilhelmina is said to have narrowly escaped to London via a British warship which was bombed and strafed by pursuing Nazi planes.
The news isn’t any better in Monday’s papers. Ralph W. Barnes writes in the New York Herald Tribune that the German high command is claiming the whole of Luxembourg and an important “break-through” on the fortified defense line in northeastern Belgium between the Dutch city of Maastricht and the Belgian city of Hasselt. A story by George Axelsson in the New York Times says that “all of northern Netherlands from the border to the North Sea” is now in German hands. Apparently Nazi motorized units, supported by warplanes, “smashed their way from the border to the sea, a distance of roughly 80 miles, in a little more than 48 hours.” William Shirer said on C.B.S. last night that neutral military observers in Berlin are “astounded” at how fast the Germans are knifing through Holland, a country full of rivers and canals.
AND THE GOOD NEWS IS... About 20,000 British troops have been fed into the Dutch fighting, and substantial forces of both British and French troops have taken up positions in south Belgium. There’s no clear sign yet that they’ve been able to even slow down the Nazi avalanche, and Allied communiques claiming the enemy has been “halted” seem to be out-of-date by the time they reach the newspapers. But there is one bit of good news -- German forces haven’t made any headway against the Maginot Line. According to an Associated Press dispatch, a “large force” of German troops are battering the French now along a forty-mile stretch of the Franco-German border, helped by artillery and air bombardment.
WHAT’S THE NAZI “SECRET WEAPON”? After since the Germans said last Saturday they seized the Belgian fortress of Eben Emael with “a new kind of attack,” reporters started buzzing about a Nazi “secret weapon.” The Associated Press says in a Monday dispatch that military experts in Switzerland believe the Nazis employed a non-fatal “nerve gas” at Eben Emael. The A.P. says that “some such gas is known to have been developed in Germany and studied elsewhere in recent months.” In Monday’s Washington Post, Robert Kleiman cites military men as speculating the new weapon could be “a secret gas, a mysterious high explosive, or an ‘old weapon’ -- propaganda -- designed to frighten the Allies.” The officers he quotes are skeptical of the “fantastic reports” of new German weapons.
I am, too. In fact, I was inclined to think at first that the press was reckless in rushing to equate the words “new kind of attack” with “new weapon.” But Sigrid Schultz writes in Monday’s Chicago Tribune that the Nazis are now claiming the “help of new weapons” in pushing back Belgian resistance.
Still, if the Germans actually have some sort of incredible weapon that could turn the tide of battle, why didn’t they use it in Norway?
THE INVASION HAS WRECKED THE BLOCKADE. Monday’s Chicago Tribune also takes up a subject I haven’t seen covered elsewhere yet -- just how much of a windfall the Germans are expecting to reap in food and oil from Belgium and Holland. According to the Tribune, the two countries have about five million dairy and beef cattle, about one-fourth of Germany’s total herd at the outbreak of the war. The Nazis have already seized five million head of cattle in Denmark and Norway. And in Denmark alone Germany confiscated enough oil “to keep her army supplied with fuel through the summer.” There’s no numbers in the story, but it’s said that the Low Countries possess “vast oil stores.”
All of this means that the much-vaunted British blockade, which was supposed to bring the Reich’s economy to the brink of collapse, isn't a factor in the war anymore, and won't be, unless the fighting goes on for a lot longer.
“BLOOD, TOIL, TEARS, AND SWEAT.” Britain’s new prime minister only spoke briefly to Parliament Monday, but Winston Churchill did get off a few memorable turns of phrase, promising the British people only “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” in the fight ahead, until the nation won “victory in spite of all terrors.” Hearing him speak on the radio, it’s no wonder why people call him a “bulldog” -- his voice is certainly gruff and jowly, but has a wonderful grandeur to it. His new government of national unity, comprised of nine Conservatives, four Laborites, and two Liberals, was approved by the House of Commons Monday in a 381-0 vote.
A highly laudatory article in Monday’s New York Herald Tribune says that with the new appointments, “Churchill has broken the grasp which the ‘tired old men’ of Neville Chamberlain’s day held for so long on Britain’s government.”
WHAT’S CHURCHILL LIKE? (II) The profiles of Prime Minister Churchill have started showing up in the papers, and Hedley Donovan gets off a good one in Sunday’s Washington Post. He notes prominently that the sixty-five-year-old Churchill has had a long public life, serving in ten cabinet posts and holding a seat in the House of Commons for thirty-eight of the last forty years. Moreover, Britons have been familiar with the adventurous turns of his colorful career for a long, long time --
“Britain has known many Winston Churchills and has regarded them with varying emotions -- amusement, admiration and annoyance, but never boredom. There was the Churchill of the heyday of Victorian imperialism, journalist, soldier, and precocious politician. There was the maturing statesman who served in the Asquith and Lloyd George cabinets as Home Minister, First Lord of the Admiralty, Munitions, Air, War, and Colonial Minister. There was Col. Winston Churchill, of the Sixth Royal Scots Fusiliers, who joined his regiment in France in the middle months of the World War when he was forced out of the Admiralty and given a sinecure cabinet portfolio. There was the disgruntled Tory of the early 1920's, out of office and short of temper on a wide variety of subjects from India to socialism...Freshest in the memory of his countrymen is Churchill’s Cassandra role, his speeches week in and week out, from 1934 to 1939, warning that Nazi Germany was rearming ‘while England sleeps.’”
BRITAIN PREPARES FOR A NAZI LANDING. Churchill has more immediate problems to worry about these days. James Reston writes from London in Sunday’s New York Times that the British “now are guarding against the possibility that the Germans might try to land troops by parachute here as they did in Belgium and Holland, or try to slip them past the British Navy into lonely harbors as they did in Norway.” Mr. Reston emphasizes that it would be “madness” for the Germans to try to airlift enough troops into Britain to conquer the country, but even a small attack of this nature could do much to sabotage the British war effort, divert attention and supplies from the main battle, and cause “psychological shock” among civilians. British officials, he says, have no doubt now that when the Nazis try and knock Britain out of the war, they’ll do so by means of a “combined plane and submarine attack on everything that floats or flies.”
It’s not surprising, then, to read in Monday’s New York Herald Tribune that Home Secretary Anderson has issued a sweeping order for “the immediate internment of all male Germans and Austrians between the ages of sixteen and sixty, who live anywhere in the eastern counties of Scotland or England or in the southern tier of Kent westward to the Isle of Wight.” Reporter Frank R. Kelley writes that about 3,000 enemy aliens will be rounded up under the order, and another 11,000 non-German aliens, including some Americans, will be required to adhere to a new curfew of 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.
THE CHIGAGO TRIBUNE DEMANDS THE U.S. RE-ARM. After months of arguing that the outcome of the European war really doesn’t much matter to us, the Chicago Tribune’s editors had something of a Damascus Road experience on Monday. No, they still don’t want us to help the Allies, but the newspaper which has printed pacifist propaganda and fought every attempt in the past to fortify Guam, for example, now argues in a dramatic front-page editorial that America needs to arm massively, and fast. A lot of what the Tribune says is true, and pretty troubling. It’s worthy of consideration. But it makes for irritating reading, having to wade through the Tribune’s hysterical insistence on blaming our ill-preparedness entirely on you-know-who --
“We haven’t enough of the new rifles to keep even a division supplied with them. At last reports there were fewer than 8,000 of the guns available and the quantity is being increased by no more than a few hundred a month....Our lack of modern artillery is even more appalling. Practically speaking, we haven’t any...In antiaircraft weapons our deficiency is even more glaring. We have about 50 high grade guns of 3 inch caliber which were obsolete before they were issued....The army today has only 2,700 planes and of these all but 52 large bombers are regarded as obsolete....We are rich, and fat, and feeble. The confidence of congress in the ability of our armed services to provide us with an adequate apparatus of defense has been misplaced. The time has come for a radical shaking up and shaking out of the uniformed burocracy in Washington. The national danger can be averted only if an aroused country demands from the playboy in the White House the housecleaning which is long overdue.”
IS THE U.S. CLOSER TO WAR? In the Sunday New York Times, Arthur Krock isolates two competing schools of thought in Washington, D.C., this week. The isolationists, he says, believe that Hitler’s offensive will bring the war to a “speedy termination” and will force the Allies to negotiate a peace that will keep America out of the war and allow us enough time to prepare our own defenses against anything to come. The other side, however, believes that now that the battle is joined, it will go on for a long time, and thus could expand to the Western Hemisphere or to the Far East, “and because of that war is certain to come much nearer to the United States.” No matter which side of that debate prevails in Congress, Mr. Krock writes, the events of the last week might prompt a sea-change in the Roosevelt administration’s neutrality policy --
“The President...told his Friday press conference he had lost none of his confidence that military involvement can be avoided for this country; and it must therefore be assumed he shares the belief that the recent spread of the war in Europe will not mount the western barrier. Nevertheless, Mr. Roosevelt wholly endorsed a statement by the Queen of Holland. And the text of this indicates he may in some way seek to persuade the country that neutrality is a lost policy in this present world and, short of military action, should be abandoned. For the Queen noted that, despite the observance of strict neutrality and a solemn German promise that it would be respected, the invasion came. Mr. Roosevelt seemed to be saying, ‘We won’t confide in neutrality that long, and perhaps we won’t even pretend to confide in it any longer.’ If this is the effect of Hitler’s latest invasion it is a momentous one.”
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