ALLIED RESCUE AT DUNKERQUE. It looks like the New York Times was right last Wednesday -- massive numbers of Allied troops are escaping to Britain from what was thought to be a Nazi death-trap in northern France. Everybody’s reporting the story this week-end, and the Saturday Times says that three-fourths of the entire British Expeditionary Force has been successfully taken out of the Flanders pocket from Dunkerque, the Allies’ one remaining port. Times Reporter Harold Denny witnessed the arrival in London of “dazed but happy” Allied soldiers who made the cross-Channel trip in a motley array of landing craft -- “steamboats of all sizes, many of them had been pleasure boats in happier days, coastal tramp ships, dingy fishing boats and motor boats. A tug chugged in towing a string of five barges loaded with soldiers.”
“They were welcomed not sadly as a beaten army but primarily as the heroes in one of the bravest chapters in Great Britain’s military annals,” writes Mr. Denny. Good news indeed, in light of the expectations of a week ago that half a million Allied troops in the pocket would be seized or killed by the Germans.
So exactly how many have gotten out? Military authorities are keeping the actual number a secret, and press estimates are all over the place. The United Press seconds the Times’ estimate that three-quarters of the B.E.F. has been saved, and notes the original strength of the B.E.F. was estimated at 300,000 to 350,000 men. The Associated Press reports Saturday that 130,000 British troops had been taken from Dunkerque as of Friday night. Another A.P. story reported a British estimate that 90,000 troops were removed on Friday itself. Yet another A.P. dispatch puts the British force originally sent to Flanders at 175,000, and says two-thirds of the troops reaching England are British.
HOW DUNKERQUE HAPPENED. It was a combination of brilliance and luck. A week ago German tanks along the coast were only twelve miles from Dunkerque, but their advance came to a sudden and surprising halt. In recent days French engineers opened the gates on surrounding canals, turning the surrounding land into a marshy area flooded a foot-and-a-half deep. (A map in Saturday’s New York Herald Tribune shows the nine canals in the area of the port city.) Meanwhile, British Navy destroyers used their heavy guns as a covering artillery to lessen the Germans’ ability to fire on Allied troops retreating toward Dunkerque. Allied ships maneuvered expertly in shallow water and in darkness, while subjected to Nazi air bombardment. The “luck” came in the form of two days of bad weather, which hampered the Germans in making wide-scale air attacks.
NAZIS SAY FLANDERS CLEAN-UP ALMOST OVER. The rescue is still going on, although radio reports this morning say the flow of troops from Dunkerque has slowed to a “trickle” and British officials say the evacuation is now “nearly complete.” The port itself, or what remains of it, is still in Allied hands, defended by a British division and two French divisions against an advancing German infantry force backed by dive bombers and heavy artillery. Sigrid Schultz writes in Saturday’s Chicago Tribune that German officials now consider the Flanders battle to be “completed except for mopping up work,” and they expect their army “to strike next at the French southern armies alone the Somme and Aisne rivers.” Miss Schultz also reports the Nazis are rushing regiments of naval artillery into position to shell England’s channel coast.
MORE FRENCH ATTACKS ALONG THE SOMME. General Weygand’s efforts to reach the Flanders pocket from the south may have come to naught, but the French are still attacking on the Somme front. A Saturday Associated Press story says French tanks supporting a second British Expeditionary Force have driven the Germans out of a crucial bridgehead across the Somme at Abbeville, taking hundreds of prisoners and seizing large amounts of Nazi war material. There may be bigger things to come -- “The action along the Somme was mentioned by the French command’s night communique only as ‘a certain activity,’ indicating the secrecy that customarily surrounds the start of major movements.” (Update -- the French claimed last night to have repulsed “two strong German surprise attacks” east of Amiens, along the upper Somme).
THE FRENCH REMAIN CONFIDENT. The French Army has done a good job of halting the Nazi southward push along the line of the Somme and Aisne rivers -- though who knows what will happen if the German troops in Flanders are thrown into the southern battle. The French don’t seem worried, though. There’s an interesting story by P.J. Phillips in Saturday’s New York Times describing the “amazing, one might almost say sublime, confidence with which the still intact hulk of the French Army regards the future.” According to Mr. Phillips, this is the case even though the Nazi offensive has “cut off France from her northern coal supplies and the immense industrial area of Lille” and has “driven millions of people from their occupations and farms to shelter.”
But French officers continue to “speak confidently of victory,” and their words are backed by a still-large army with plenty of material -- though there’s a question of whether they have enough heavy tanks and warplanes to handle another German lightning attack. But this time, the French feel they can take it and hold on until an opportunity for victory appears. Let’s hope so.
THE NAZIS CAN’T INVADE BRITAIN... At least one expert believes that Hitler will go after France now, and not Britain, because “a German invasion of England could not be accomplished in the next few months.” A United Press story quotes Major Alexander P. de Seversky, American plane builder and speed flyer, as pooh-poohing the current “panic” that a Nazi invasion of England is in the offing --
“Students of aerial warfare realize that if any one has command of the air over land or sea nothing can be done in defense against such a power until the air is cleared....There can be no immediate invasion of England because while Germany had complete mastery of the air over Scandinavia she does not have it over England by a long shot. Defensively, Britain is greatly superior. Her Spitfire, which I flew last summer, is a superior plane to any which the Germans have in great numbers. Therefore, no invasion of England is possible until that superiority of the air over England is achieved....The near future may tell a different story of the war in Europe.”
...OR MAYBE THEY CAN. Major Seversky might offer comforting tidings, but Edward R. Murrow’s broadcast on C.B.S. Friday night indicated that the British are getting ready for a Nazi invasion in a hurry. Mr. Murrow reported, after driving for a hundred and fifty miles through southern and southeastern England, that the road signs and town and village signs have all been taken down. “Old trucks, tractors, and farm carts” sit in the bushes, ready to be pushed on the road, and gun emplacements are hastily being installed are strategic crossroads. “Coming to London tonight,” Mr. Murrow said, “I wished for a compass.”
LIPPMANN – U.S. HAS SUFFERED “DEFEAT.” There was another must-read column by Walter Lippmann in Thursday’s New York Herald Tribune, making clear once again that the fate of the Allies is tied to our own --
“Time is not our ally. We lost that ally of ours, namely the time which democracies need in order to muddle through, when we refused to lift a finger to prevent the war and when later we allowed ourselves to be bound hand and foot in a stiff and stupid neutrality. Whether all the people of the United States have as yet realized it or not, American has already suffered a tremendous defeat. It is a defeat which can be redressed. But it can be redressed only by enormous courage, unflinching sacrifice, and the utmost lucidity and wisdom in our leaders.”
Mr. Lippmann prescribes that we immediately adopt “the principle of universal service [and] the principle of the total dedication of our resources.” And we should do so not for ourselves -- “We should appropriate a very large sum of money to feed the ravaged people of western Europe...We should do it first of all because we ought not go to the Day of Judgment with it on our consciences that we sat around with a surplus of food while the most highly civilized peoples in the world were allowed to perish.” And, above all, “We should...[make] available to the Allies any weapons we possess which are not immediately indispensable to preserve law and order within the inner zone of our strategic defenses.”
MUSSOLINI’S VAIN DREAMS. Newspapermen seem pretty much unanimous that Mussolini will very soon bring Italy into the war on Hitler’s side, but Barnet Nover writes in his Washington Post column Friday that the Duce’s own dreams of conquest are illusory --
“What can Italy gain? On paper a great deal. Mussolini’s dream of a revived Roman Empire remains a dream as long as the British and French empires exist, as long as British sea power is unbroken. Should Great Britain and France be smashed, Italy might fall heir to the French colonies in North Africa. The Mediterranean, so goes the dream, would then become an Italian lake. But that is only a dream. For while the Roman Empire was supreme and unchallenged throughout the vast area it dominated, it was also unchallenged from outside. It was not until Rome was in its decline that the barbarians from the north became a real problem. Now, however, an Italian victory would be primarily a German victory. Mussolini cannot be victorious without Hitler....To be sure the Fuehrer might reward the Duce for Italy’s intervention by permitting Italy to expand in Africa and the Mediterranean. But what he might give he could also take back.”
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