Tuesday, June 25, 1940

FRANCE – THE PRICE OF PEACE. The terms of Germany’s armistice with France have been made public -- not by the Nazis, but by the British. The terms are brutal. According to James MacDonald in Monday’s New York Times, the Germans will occupy the entire northern half of France, as well as a sizeable north-to-south strip of the Atlantic coastal region extending to the Spanish border. A jagged border separates the occupied zone from an “independent” France, which promises to turn over to the Reich all “artillery, planes, tanks, and munitions.” The Petain regime will be allowed to maintain a “small force,” but not a regular army. Most strikingly, writes Mr. MacDonald, the French have agreed to “the immediate recall of the French fleet to its home waters. The fleet would then come under German and Italian control at ports to be specified and its personnel interred.” But the Nazis do promise, cross their hearts and hope to die, that they won’t seize the sizeable assets of the French navy and use them against Britain. (To add insult to injury, Italy is said in the Times to have claimed France’s entire Mediterranean coast as Mussolini’s price for peace. Which is utterly ridiculous -- how many shots did the brave Fascist legions fire in their “offensive” directed at the French Alps? Twenty? Thirty?)

There’s still some confusion about exactly when the armistice goes into effect, if it hasn’t already. The radio this morning isn’t enlightening on this point. The fighting was supposed to stop as soon as the Italian armistice was concluded. The radio does say this morning that the France and Italy have agreed to terms, but nobody’s saying yet what those terms are.

William Shirer broadcast from Paris last night on the C.B.S.  He related the confusion of Parisians about when the fighting will stop and their hopes that peace will somehow save the lives of ten million French refugees who are threatened with starvation. Mr. Shirer also relates an odd and disturbing detail – people in Paris are “pleasantly surprised” so far by the “polite behavior” of German officers and soldiers. There’s fraternization and downright friendliness between conqueror and conquered, examples of which the correspondent witnessed for himself.

CHURCHILL BREAKS WITH PETAIN. Larry Rue writes in Monday’s Chicago Tribune on Britain’s repudiation of the Petain government, whose surrender is viewed in London as a “breach of faith.” Churchill’s argument, and it’s a sound one, is that “the Anglo-French treaty of alliance...bound Britain and France not to conclude a separate peace. This clause was said to have been inserted at France’s request to remove misgivings as to England’s determination.” According to the New York Herald Tribune account, Britain also maintains that Petain’s agreement to the harsh Nazi peace terms “reduced the Bordeaux government to a state of complete subjection to the enemy and deprived it of all liberty and of all right to represent free French citizens.”

So just what kind of French regime does Britain now recognize? According to the Herald Tribune, it’s a “French National Committee” set up by rebel Frenchmen in London, led by Gen. Charles de Gaulle. General de Gaulle is a former Under Secretary of War in the Reynaud government who negotiated with Churchill two weeks ago during the abortive attempt to join the French and British Empires into a single sovereign state. He pledged in a B.B.C. radio broadcast to France Sunday to carry on the war to “final victory,” and that the Committee would account for its actions to “the legal and established French government as soon as one exists.” Significantly, the Committee may have a large base to fight from. According to Mr. Rue’s story in the Tribune, French commanders in Syria, French Indo-China, Madagascar, Tunis, and Morocco have promised to continue fighting the Axis. That certainly would take some of the sting out of Petain’s surrender.

A DISHONORABLE PEACE. The New York Herald Tribune editorializes that it’s no wonder the British, not the Germans, were the first ones to trumpet the specifics of the French armistice agreement --

“It is easy to understand why it is London and not Bordeaux, or Berlin, which is hastening to publish the terms through every corner of the world which is still free to read them. It is a safe guess that every French ship, every French colonial capital and every listener on French soil whom the British can reach has already heard this text. For, whatever else it may be, this is certainly not the ‘honorable peace’ without which the Bordeaux government declared that it would resist until the end....The government which could sign these terms not only puts France in the position of leaving Great Britain in the lurch in her desperate hour but undertakes to require all Frenchmen everywhere to make themselves into silent partners in Hitlerism and passive allies, in effect, in the reduction of what is now the last citadel of civilized Europe. This is not an honorable surrender. Perhaps it was unavoidable; and those who have retained at a temporarily safe distance have earned no right to criticize. But the facts speak for themselves, and it may be that on the power with which they speak to the French people and to those parts of the empire still capable of resistance, future history may yet turn.”

BRITAIN’S CHANCES OF SURVIVAL. In Sunday’s New York Times, James. B. Reston calculates both sides’ advantages and disadvantages in the coming Battle of Britain --

“The chief weaknesses of this country in the present and perhaps the decisive battle of the war are a bad start and the general inefficiency of everything. The nation has quality -- of men and machines -- but it has not quantity of anything. It is a nation of 48,000,000 fighting one of 80,000,000. Its aircraft in the past has been fighting at odds of 1 to 4 and there is no assurance that even this average will not get less favorable. Its bomb production too, an important item in these days and nights of reprisals, again is below the enemy’s. But it has, of course, its strength. Hitler may be a miracle man but he has not yet mastered the elements. He cannot turn water into land and so long as Britain has a big moat around her fortress she has a great advantage in the coming struggle. The German Fuehrer can bring this country to is knees in three main ways. He can bomb her out, starve her out, or drive her out by invasion, but so long as that moat remains the last is going to be difficult. As Mr. Churchill pointed out in the Commons this week, though it would not be difficult for the Germans to land 10,000 men somewhere on Britain’s long coastline it would take 250 ships for him to transport five divisions -- a figure the Prime Minister seemed to believe would be necessary to form a formidable force.”

Mr. Reston notes that even with all the alarming news of the past month, many of Britain’s citizens are facing their terrible situation with a curious complacency -- “Many of them...want, in fact they almost insist, on believing the best and no matter what Prime Minister Churchill or Alfred Duff Cooper or the editorial writers say they keep on feeling that everything is going to be all right. This is at once a strength and a weakness. It is a strength because they do not get hysterical and panicky and waste a lot of nervous energy worrying about invasion and bombing before they come...but at the same time it is a great weakness because hundreds of thousands of them simply have not got excited enough about the country’s danger to do anything to help her.”

BOTH PARTIES ARE “ANTI-WAR”. Despite the charges made by isolationists, Mark Sullivan argues in Sunday’s Washington Post that Democrats and Republicans alike are united in a determination to not send our troops across the ocean --

“There is one area of war policy about which there is general agreement. This could be stated simply enough: ‘America will never send a conscripted army to fight in Europe.’ Upon that there is general agreement by the Republicans in Philadelphia, and likewise general agreement by the Democrats in Washington. President Roosevelt has stated this principle so emphatically that he could not depart from it without such stultification as would be unthinkable. So many leaders have stated this, in both parties; so many have stated it in a form that amounts to promise, and the public has been so generally assured on this point, that to depart from it now would be an intolerable shock to public confidence in our parties and leaders. To send an army to Europe, after so many pledges that we would not do it, would result in a lack of faith by the people in their leaders, as deplorable as any possible consequence of not sending an army to Europe.”

But Mr. Sullivan also warns that “careless promisers, in complete good faith, have sometimes stated it differently -- that we would not send an American Army ‘abroad.’ And yet, in the very earliest stages of the condition brought upon us by German conquest, we found that to use the word ‘abroad’ would limit us in a way hardly possible to live up to. In several contingencies, easily foreseeable, it may be necessary to send American troops to some of the West Indies, or to some portions of South America. That would be ‘abroad.’” It’s an intelligent distinction, and one can hope the Republicans in Philadelphia won’t neglect it, isolationist patter to the contrary.

TWO-THIRDS OF AMERICANS BACK CONSCRIPTION. This week’s Gallup survey in Sunday’s Washington Post shows a startling and rapid, shift in public opinion in favor of compulsory military training. Only 39% favored compulsory training last October, and that shifted to a 50-50 split at the beginning of June. And only three weeks later, Dr. Gallup says that 64% of Americans now favor one year of compulsory military service, with 36% opposed. In addition, about three-fourths of those surveyed support drafting young men to fill up vacancies in the army if its projected enlisted strength of 400,000 men is not reached by volunteer enlistments.

Another set of Gallup surveys show a remarkable bipartisan spirit on foreign policy and defense issues. Asked if the U.S. should give “greater aid” to the Allies, 68% of Democrats and 64% of Republicans said yes. By contrast, only 8% of Democrats and 6% of Republicans favor an American declaration of war on Germany. Democrat and Republican views on compulsory military training are almost identical. And almost equal numbers from the two parties support fighting to defend the West Indies and Canada from foreign aggression -- 84% of Democrats and Republicans alike would go to war for the West Indies, and 87% of Democrats and 86% of Republicans would do so for Canada.

These numbers are extremely encouraging. They suggest that the attempts by some isolationist Republicans this week in Philadelphia to shape the G.O.P. into a head-in-the-sand “peace party” will not register with voters. One can hope that the party’s nominee will reject the cynical, anti-British line of the “peace” crowd.