PARIS FALLS. Even with all the warning that it was coming, and even with all the terrible news of the last five weeks, this is almost too dumbfounding for words.
German troops marched into Paris on Friday. Despite an earlier report in the Chicago Tribune that the French were preparing a Warsaw-like last stand in the capital, the French government declared Paris an open city Thursday and decided not to make a defense on the outskirts. (That in itself prompts very mixed feelings of regret and relief). Friday’s papers carried the first word, from U.S. Ambassador Bullitt, who had remained at his post in Paris and telephoned the news to the State Department that the Nazis had arrived. The New York Times’ C. Brooks Peters begins his Saturday dispatch from Berlin with the chilling words, “Today, for the third time within the last century and a quarter, victorious German troops marched into Paris....They are the bearers of a proposed new order for Europe and perhaps the world, a major tenet of which is to destroy the old one.”
A Washington Post editorial describes with frightening frankness what civilization is now up against -- “The history of our times shows no parallel for this stupendous German victory. There is no precedent for the amazing organization, the smashing power, the almost superhuman energy with which a small and impoverished country has burst through its frontiers, has broken down all resistance and now tramples the prostate civilization of France....A testing period, such as is seldom given a generation to endure, now lies ahead. To meet it successfully will require sacrifice, courage, good judgment and above all integrity of purpose.”
IS THE FRENCH FRONT COLLAPSING? There’s an alarming note from G.H. Archambault in Saturday’s New York Times -- “It is impossible tonight to indicate the present front even approximately. It is really one long line of pockets and salients, a situation calling for great qualities of generalship in order to preserve cohesion of the French forces.” Radio reports this morning indicate the Germans are racing southward across the Seine “on the broadest front,” to quote the German military communique. Saturday’s map in the New York Herald Tribune shows the Nazis fifty miles north of Chaumont, which is in the rear of the now-endangered Maginot Line. The radio news today says they’ve reached it. (Chaumont, by the way, is 135 miles southeast of Paris). According to the Associated Press, the French are fighting back with “desperate fury,” but their only success this week-end in stopping the Germans has been in repulsing a blistering Nazi assault in the Saar region, in front of the Maginot Line.
In addition to Paris and Chaumont, the Germans have taken Montmedy, the northern anchor of the Maginot Line, and Verdun, site of one of the most famous Allied stands of the World War. On the western part of the front, Nazi troops have seized the port of Le Havre and reached Versailles. The main danger at the moment is the armored spearhead at Chaumont -- if the Germans continue their advance at this rate of speed, the Maginot Line, and its million French defenders, will be cut off from the rest of France in another two to three days.
A COMING “BATTLE OF THE LOIRE”... Several of Saturday’s press accounts mention the Loire River, which runs through the western half of France’s midsection, as being the next logical place for France to mount a stable defense. An Associated Press dispatch from Tours says the river, which runs through Tours and Orleans, is “a strong natural barrier.” (Orleans is also on the northernmost pont of the Loire, some seventy miles below Paris.) Perhaps in view of making a stand on the Loire, this, the French government, which fled last week from Paris to Tours, is on the move again -- this time some 250 miles further south, to Bordeaux.
The New York Times says Saturday, “With the withdrawal of the French troops charged with the defense of Paris the first phase of the Battle of France was ended in defeat. It may be called the Battle of the Seine. The next phase may be the Battle of the Loire.”
...OR A CAPITULATION. Skepticism is starting to show up in the press that France will continue the fight much longer, at least in her homeland. The Associated Press calls the military moves by French armies south of Paris “a fighting retreat that may be their last movement of the war.” The Germans are crowing that the end is near. Sigrid Schultz of the Chicago Tribune quotes German military authorities as saying the latest Nazi advances prove that “the moral resistance of the French troops has been crippled.” Ralph W. Barnes writes from Berlin in Saturday's New York Herald Tribune that words like “rout and “debacle” are now being applied by the Nazi high command to the situation of the French Army. The United Press cites Nazi leaders as boasting that France will “be beaten to her knees” in another ten days.
REYNAUD BEGS U.S. FOR “CLOUDS” OF WARPLANES. Before the French government fled Tours, Premier Reynaud made a broadcast Thursday night pleading for American intervention. “We know what a high place ideals hold in the life of the American people,” he said. “Will they hesitate yet to declare themselves against Nazi Germany?” Three days after pleading with President Roosevelt to provide every kind of aid short of a U.S. expeditionary force, the Premier declared, “It is necessary that clouds of airplanes come across the Atlantic to crush the evil power that has descended over Europe.” The New York Times says the French need 5,000 planes, which is many, many more than the U.S. has. In response, according to Friday’s Chicago Tribune, the President says the U.S. is doing everything possible to help, but that only Congress can make a military alliance.
According to Larry Rue in Friday’s Chicago Tribune, the British are trying to cheer themselves up with talk of what an American declaration of war could do to bolster the Allied cause. The London News Chronicle is quoted as exulting, “A declaration of war by America now would inject an impulse of bounding hope into every Frenchman’s heart. The effect on the Nazis would be correspondingly depressing. Now, in this momentous crisis, America may have it in her power to tide civilization over its darkest hour by a strong dramatic act.”
THE FRENCH SCORN AMERICAN SYMPATHY. Sonia Tomara, the New York Herald Tribune’s Paris correspondent, writes a harrowing tale in Saturday’s paper about her attempt to flee southward with her sister and a doctor who had been treating refugees. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising, but it is, a little, that she hasn’t found any good will toward America --
“The French people I talked with along the route from Paris expressed their disappointment at the inaction of the United States. They feel that in spite of all the sympathy and moral support of the American people, France has been left alone to fight a much superior enemy. ‘We alone are to defend civilization,’ they said, ‘completely alone.’ French censorship has withheld the fact that President Roosevelt said his heart was with the Allies, for such a statement would appear as the worst irony to the French. The general feeling is: ‘We are tired of moral support and of sympathy. Let the Americans keep their heart to themselves. We don’t need it alone. We need planes to fight the German planes that are mowing down our men.’”
Miss Tomara eventually made it, by car and on foot, to Tours, where she filed this dispatch in the middle of a Nazi air raid. She writes in closing, “The catastrophe that has befallen France has no parallel in human history. Nobody knows how or when it will end. Like the other refugees, and there are millions of us, I do not know tonight when I shall sleep in a bed again, or how I will get out of this town.”
AMERICA CAN’T STOP THE NAZIS -- YET. George Soule writes in last week’s New Republic that there’s actually very little that the U.S. could do to crush Hitlerism in the coming months, unless the Allies, or at least Britain, somehow manage to hold on --
“Much as we should like to end Nazism in Europe, we are not ready to do it. We could not possibly be ready before the decisive battles of the present war are fought. If Hitler wins these, nothing less than an overwhelmingly powerful air force, a navy big enough to whip the combined navies of all possible opponents and to operate on the other side of the Atlantic, an army of not less than five million men on the front lines, trained, equipped, and supplied, and a fleet of transports about as large as the combined merchant fleets of the world, would be safe preparation. I do not put such a daring conquest beyond the capacities of the American people if they earnestly subordinated everything else to it, but they would surely not be prepared to try it before five or perhaps ten years. If this is what we are arming for, we shall have to spend not less then $25,000,000,000 annually on military preparations, or from one-quarter to one-half of our national income....We shall have to organize our whole national life about a war economy and sacrifice all other pursuits. I doubt if we have, or shall develop, sufficiently firm resolution for such an endeavor. If the Allies are not defeated within a few months, we may help to turn the scales by measures short of war, though it is a little difficult to see how we can open this door much wider to them than we already have done.”
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