Thursday, June 20, 1940

THE STAKES. Nobody’s stated them more plainly or more eloquently than Prime Minister Churchill did when he spoke to the House of Commons on Tuesday --

“What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin. On this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned loose upon us. Hitler knows he will have to break us in this island or he will lose this war. If we can stand up to him all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad sunny uplands; but if we fail, the whole world, including the United States and all that we have known or cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister and perhaps more prolonged by the lights of a perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire last for a thousand years, men will still say ‘This was their finest hour.’”

The New York Times notes that Prime Minister Churchill is “famous” for his perorations. Has any leader in such a critical period, except perhaps for Lincoln, ever spoken with more poetry in his voice?

THE FRENCH ARE STILL FIGHTING -- FOR NOW. An unbylined story in Wednesday’s New York Herald Tribune reports that the new French premier, Marshall Petain, has “ordered his army, navy, and air force to continue fighting” while he studies the reply from Berlin and Rome to his request for terms. The French Cabinet decided in Bordeaux Tuesday to insist on a negotiated peace with the Nazis, and not a total surrender, says the Herald Tribune. But the radio news this morning cites unconfirmed reports that the German terms are “harsh” and considered unacceptable. It’s rumored that President Lebrun and other officials have gone, or shortly will go, to Algiers and continue the war from there. T.J. Hamilton reports from Madrid in Wednesday’s New York Times reports from Madrid that the Axis peace terms include surrender of the French fleet, but that this will have to be changed, since “virtually all” French ships (and numerous planes) have left French ports for North Africa. Good.

As to the fighting, there appears to be very little semblance of a front left. The Nazi thrust behind the Maginot Line has reached Switzerland, and the gallant handfuls of Frenchmen who were manning the Line’s artillery to cover their retreat of some 450,000 of their comrades have been crushed by Nazi forces attacking from the Rhine. Meanwhile, France’s latest capital, Bordeaux, was bombed four times Tuesday. The papers aren’t bothering to print maps showing the battle line any more, but presumably the Germans are by now continuing their push southward practically at will.

One troubling report Wednesday from the Reuters’ correspondent with the British Expeditionary Force -- there’s widespread feeling among French officers and civilians that Marshal Petain is “pro-Fascist” and “might not long continue to receive the support of the French people.” And, if this is true, he might not wish to continue the fight, either, no matter how cruel the Nazi peace terms are.

A NAZI-SOVIET CRISIS IN THE BALTIC? Russia has gotten a taste for aggression again, having opted for an abrupt military invasion this past week of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Stalin’s regime already had mutual-assistance pacts with all three countries, and military bases within them, and treated them all like colonies. But the Associated Press says the Reds suddenly alleged, presumably with a straight face, that these three small nations were banding together in a military alliance which was “profoundly dangerous and menacing to the security” of the Soviet Union. So in went Russian troops, and out went the nominally independent governments of these countries.

But some startling news since then is laid out in a couple of New York Times articles, which indicate that tensions are building between Germany and Russia. Even though Hitler and Stalin practically seemed like wartime allies back in the winter, the Times reports Wednesday that the Nazis are carrying out “troop movements of an unspecified nature” in East Prussia, opposite some 500,000 Russian soldiers, whose numbers include motorized and armored units.

Why is this happening now? A separate story in the Times by Otto D. Tolischus says that “according to travelers returning from Moscow, something like panic prevails in Moscow over the quick German victories, which have been wholly contrary to Russian calculations, and this is also advanced as an explanation of the precipitate Russian action in the Baltic.” Mr. Tolischus adds, “It is also recalled that in ‘Mein Kampf’ Hitler demands the annihilation of France as merely ‘a means to give our people the possibility of expansion in another place,’ and the only place he sees for such an explanation is Russia.” The Times also quotes a Swedish newspaper as postulating that Stalin invaded the Baltic states now because he knows “that his turn is coming.”

THE TRIBUNE GOES ON A BENDER. The blame-America-first crowd at the Chicago Tribune surpass themselves Wednesday in editorial-page lunacy. Having sold their readers some weeks ago the Nazi-inspired lie that the United States actually started the European war, they’re now blustering that the defeat of France is an evil deed of the Roosevelt Administration --

“American reporters in Paris write that the common people of France are blaming America for their defeat. It is to be expected, of course, that a nation worsted in war will seek a scapegoat to account for the disaster, but there is also much rational justification for the feeling of the French that this country betrayed them. Mr. Roosevelt had given France every reason to think that America was guaranteeing their victory, and he didn’t make good. Mr. Roosevelt wanted to go to war in Europe; the logic of his diplomacy led to war as its inescapable conclusion. He hastily abandoned even the pretense of neutrality. Evidently he calculated that if the French and their allies could not win the war alone they could at least hold the Germans in check for a time, which he would use to whip up the war fever in this country, just as his mentor, President Wilson, had done a generation ago....There can be no doubt at all that his inflammatory speeches and his denunciations of the dictators in his public papers encouraged the allies to believe that they could count on American support if they needed it and accordingly to discount their own unpreparedness.”

One sympathizes with the bitterness that the ordinary people of France are feeling in these desperate days. But the Tribune’s bitterness is screwy. Imagine the perfidy of our President -- he’s been denouncing dictators! That man! Well, I never! After all, it’s not as if Hitler or Mussolini have actually done anything deserving of criticism the last few months, have they? Then too, the Tribune editors well know that aid to the Allies has been limited since the war’s outbreak not by the wish of President Roosevelt or Secretary Hull, but by the very isolationists in Congress whose cause the Tribune champions so hysterically. In other words, (1) the President’s opponents hamper the President’s efforts to aid France, and then (2) France is defeated, so therefore (3) it’s the President’s fault for wanting to aid France. Is there a school in the Chicago area that teaches a good remedial course in Logic?

FRANCE FINDS FAULT IN MANY PLACES. Dorothy Thompson writes in her New York Herald Tribune column Wednesday that the people of France are finding plenty of scapegoats to blame for the catastrophe --

“People are responsible for this. So thinks the common man in France. The last spurt of energy, the last gasp of fury is directed inward, not outward. Hatred burns in the wounded and defeated heart. Someone is to blame for this! Find the culprits!...The industrialist grinds his teeth and remembers the French New Deal. While Germany was working her factories morning, noon, and night...the French trade unions were demanding shorter days, slower work, higher pay, a ‘more abundant life.’...The workers’ eyes blaze with fury. Didn’t they promise us appeasement?...They made the diplomacy that got us into this...Our Allies let us down, they all scream together. Why didn’t Britain have more divisions? Why wouldn’t she introduce conscription?...How about our politicians? Maneuvering among themselves as to which party and which individual would come out on top, right down to the last tragic minute....Yes, this is happening in France, where hatred, exhausted outward, turns inward.”

HAVE WE HEARD THE WARNING? Barnet Nover writes in Wednesday’s Washington Post that one of the strengths of democracy was also, in a case of France, a fatal weakness --

“France’s failing was the failing of all democracies. She was civilized. She had put war and destruction behind her. She had made the comfort of the individual the goal of organized society....Democratic peoples are not geared for the kind of war which Hitler wages because, being democratic, they operate under the restraints of morality and decency and law. And every one of these instincts was turned against them to encompass their destruction. The new system that now dominates the continent of Europe had no use for these restraints. It worships force and force alone and it regards everything that is the antithesis of force as its mortal enemy. This state of mind is so monstrous that it is difficult for democratic peoples to grasp it. That, more than any other reason, is why France went under and why Belgium and the Netherlands and Norway and Denmark and the other victims of Hitler went under. For the American people the writing on the wall is too clear to be mistaken. But whether, after seven years of repeated warnings, we shall learn how to avoid the mistakes of our fellow democracies is by no means certain.”