NAZIS ARE 48 MILES FROM PARIS. Today is the fourth day of what some newspapermen now call the Battle of France. Once again, the headlines are full of hope (the banner of Saturday’s New York Herald Tribune reads, “French Lines Still Hold Firm”). But the bulletins make things sound worse this morning. It’s clear from radio reports that after fierce fighting the French have been pushed back from the so-called “Weygand Line” on a sixty-mile front along the Somme and Aisne Rivers, as one million German troops and 3,500 tanks bear down on the Allies in the greatest mechanized assault in history. The center of the thrust has reached the region of Roye and Noyon, 48 miles north of Paris. Also, German tanks are said to have broken through the Channel flank of the French defense at Forges-lex-Eaux, but the Allies are trying to disperse this advance with repeated air assaults by the R.A.F.
One radio report quotes a correspondent as saying German casualties are “appalling.” But Hitler obviously doesn’t care. The Nazis are employing no crafty strategy here -- just what G.H. Archambault in Saturday’s New York Times calls an attempt to “break through French resistance by sheer weight of metal wherever it is deemed possible.” The Germans aren’t publicly making any extravagant claims of victory as of yet. But Sigrid Schultz writes from Berlin in Saturday’s Chicago Tribune that German military experts exude “a growing confidence that the conquest of Paris is but a matter of days.”
We’re nearing a pivotal hour in the European war. It’s a good time to say a prayer for France.
“WEYGAND WEB” SLOWS THE GERMANS. Saturday’s Washington Post has a front-page map showing the defense-of-depth employed by Allied Commander-in-Chief Weygand to keep the Nazis from smashing the Somme-Aisne defense line. It shows a “zone of defensive positions and tank traps” that extends from the front lines all the way south to the Seine and Marne rivers, some sixty miles or so. This “web” appears to be making the Nazis pay a heavy price for their gains.
According to a Saturday Associated Press story, the French high command claims to have “wiped out” every German who crossed the Aisne River east of Soissons, and also to have destroyed some 400 Nazi tanks. This is about a fifth of the number of tanks the Germans started the latest offensive with. And William Shirer said last night in his C.B.S. broadcast that the German press admits that small contingents of French colonial colored troops are fighting with “unbelievable tenacity” in what sounds like guerilla-style campaigning behind the leading edge of the German advance.
The French claim that their efforts held the Germans to just “local gains” in the first three days of the offensive. But it’s been anything but easy. G.H. Archambault’s New York Times account puts it this way -- “When it comes to describing the fighting, adjectives fail -- even superlatives cannot convey any impression of the reality....Hellish is the only word -- manning machine guns and cannon in sweltering heat, stripped to the waist and bathed in perspiration, and firing, ever firing, at the advancing hordes.”
ITALY STILL WAVERING? This week-end there’s another story speculating that Italy might not want to get into the war after all -- at least just yet. This time it’s Sonia Tomara writing from Paris in the New York Herald Tribune, who passes along reports in the French press suggesting that new talks between France and Italy might be possible after all. Mussolini is said to be “impressed” by President Roosevelt’s personal messages to him, and by the notion that Italy’s entry into the war would bring the U.S. closer to the Allies, says Paul Gentizon, the Rome correspondent for Le Temps. Although “French diplomatic circles still believe that Italy will strike at France if Mussolini is sure of Germany’s victory,” Miss Tomara gives four reasons the Duce might decide against war --
“First, America’s pressure on Mussolini to not to allow the conflict to spread to the Mediterranean. ‘The situation in the Mediterranean could take on an entirely new aspect if some American cruisers dropped anchor at Gilbraltar,’ [Gentizon] wrote today....Second, the splendid resistance of the Allied troops in Flanders and now on the Somme and Aisne Rivers. ‘Il Duce apparently thinks that Germany failed to find the solution it had sought in Flanders or in France, and that the hour has therefore not yet come for Italy to intervene. The Italian enigma is much more complex than some had imagined. It may not be solved until the end of the formidable battle raging in France,’ Gentizon wrote. Third, the change in Premier Paul Reynaud’s cabinet, from which he eliminated Edouard Daladier, the man who once said France would never give anything to Italy....Fourth, Mussolini’s wavering in setting fire to the Mediterranean basin is attributed by some French diplomats and writers to the complex situation in this part of the world. It is pointed out that war between the great Mediterranean powers might arouse the Arab world, cause an eruption of the Balkan volcano and finally bring intervention of the Soviet Union in the Mediterranean – an intervention Il Duce has always dreaded.”
WOULD CONCESSIONS HELP? Miss Tomara adds in her New York Herald Tribune story that the French government’s firing of Daladier “was followed by an obviously conciliatory gesture which Reynaud made in last night’s radio speech. ‘There is no nation,’ he said, ‘with whom France could not settle by peaceful means any divergence of interests.’” This sounds like the French might be willing to listen, or perhaps even assent, to some of Italy’s demands for concessions in certain French colonies, such as Djibouti and Tunisia.
Would it be worth colonial concessions to keep Italy from fighting alongside the Nazis? I’d say the answer is an unqualified “no.” There’s no reason to believe appeasement would work with Mussolini any more than it did with Hitler. Besides, as Miss Tomara’s diplomatic sources point out, Italy will jump into the war if German victory looks certain. It’s hard to see how all the concessions in the world would stop Mussolini from joining the fight in that event -- or how a French refusal to make concessions would prod the Duce into war if a Nazi triumph appeared to be in doubt.
A PAIR OF OPTIMISTIC NOTES. After listening to this morning’s worrying radio reports, it’s a tonic to read the editorials in the current number of the New Republic. There, it’s suggested that reports of recent Nazi victories shouldn’t be considered reason to consider the Allies down for the count. There’s a lot going on that we don’t know about, the editors say --
“It is not just whistling in the dark to point out that while the way the war is going at present looks as bad as possible for the Allies, there could be a startling overturn within a short time. The first thing to remember is that, just as we have been told only part of the truth ever since the war began, now at its crisis even less is being revealed. Censorship on both sides is worked overtime...An advancing army always seems more invincible to the civilian than it does to the trained and veteran commanders at the top What may look like a confused rout on the surface doubtless assumes a more intelligible form on the general headquarters maps.”
Morever, the New Republic claims hopefully that the Nazis might actually have given up their best chance of winning the war by gambling on an all-out offensive -- “A successful defensive struggle, in which German armies never set foot on French soil, might have meant Hitler’s victory in the long run, if it gave him time to organize Balkan and Soviet resources. A war of movement such as has developed is the only kind that offers an opportunity for the phase of warfare at which the French are past masters – a great counter-offensive that can turn apparent defeat into victory. Moreover, it uses up German resources much more rapidly than a stalemate....It is just what the more aggressive military men in both France and England wanted him to attempt.”
IS THE “FIFTH COLUMN MENACE” EXAGGERATED? Barnet Nover thinks so, and explains why in his Washington Post column on Friday. Americans panicking about fifth columnists in our midst, he writes, forget that there are four other columns as well, and their dirty work is what matters most --
“If the battle raging along the Somme and the Aisne rivers in France results in a German defeat or even a stalemate which will give the Allies the time they so desperately need to equal Germany in mechanized equipment and air power, no nation in this hemisphere will have to worry about its fifth column. But if the opposite proves true, if the French army is smashed and Hitler triumphs, action against fifth column elements will obviously not be enough to preserve the internal stability and protect the external security of American countries. A healthy body does not mean, physicians tell us, a body free of germs. The microbes of a hundred diseases lurk constantly in every constitution, however robust. But these microbes only become a danger when resistance is weakened.”
No comments:
Post a Comment