800 GERMAN PLANES ATTACK BRITAIN. Is Germany’s full-scale assault on Great Britain finally underway? The big news Friday was that, instead of sending twenty-five or fifty warplanes on bombing missions over the British Isles, the Nazis sent 800. The Associated Press says the attack produced "14 hours of almost constant fighting" over the English Channel, and the shooting down of fifty-three German craft. The Luftwaffe’s objectives appear to be to deal a punishing blow to Britain’s coastal ports and wreak massive destruction on Channel shipping. According to the Chicago Tribune’s Sigrid Schultz, Berlin officials profess to be quite happy with the results -- they claim it’s the "greatest aerial victory since the capitulation of France." The Nazi kill claims are twelve merchant vessels and thirty-four R.A.F. planes.
The intensity of this attack apparently wasn’t repeated on Saturday, but the racheting-up of the air war does make one wonder if Hitler is now going to do what so many speculated he would do early this spring -- try to knock out Britain with a series of unprecedentedly violent air raids, instead of an invasion. It’s conjures up the chilling possibility of England’s great cities being turned entirely to ruin, with untold numbers of civilian casualties left unattended as essential government services struggle to function. But Prime Minister Churchill has made it clear that no amount of bombing will force Hitler’s last remaining enemy to seek peace. The Churchill pledge may be tested to its limits.
At least in the meantime, according to the A.P., Britain's bombers still giving back in kind -- "Late tonight radio stations in 10 German and German controlled cities, including Berlin and Hamburg, fell silent -- a normal indication of the presence of hostile airmen."
THAT’LL IMPRESS THE NAZIS. The headline in Saturday’s New York Herald Tribune says it all – "1st Army Tanks, All 4 of Them, Mass for Battle." Correspondent Homer Bigart writes that the 1st Army was out on maneuvers near Winthrop, New York, with the four tanks and 300 infantrymen creating quite a din in Farmer John O’Connell’s clover patch. The picture accompanying the story is priceless in itself. It shows one of the four "real" tanks advancing while several trucks with "TANK" scrawled on their sides roll along beside it. It seems the army had more fake tanks than real ones, though only temporarily – the trucks were rented from area ice companies and had to be given back.
Mr. Bigart says the maneuvers did offer some high drama -- "There was even some simulated dive bombing, provided by three planes of the 97th Observation Squadron which roared overhead from time to time, dropping bags of flour. A five-pound bag of flour is not a harmless missile when dropped from 400 feet and each appearance of the ‘bombers’ caused considerable nervousness among the generals, colonels, and majors who drove out to witness the show. One bag dropped within twenty feet of a group of officers nibbling ice cream sticks on the sidelines. A contingent of Good Humor salesmen broke ranks and fled for the shelter of trees."
God help us.
WHERE ARE OUR ARMAMENTS? For once the Chicago Tribune’s outrage is justified. John Fisher has a startling story in Saturday’s editions on War Secretary Stimson’s testimony Friday before a joint congressional tax hearing, where it was admitted that only 33 warplanes have been contracted so far -- despite the fact that Congress allocated $400,000,000 in June for a total of 4,081 planes, engines, and accessories. The Tribune story also cites testimony at a joint hearing on excess profits tax legislation, where it was said that "the present program to equip a potential army of 2,000,000 men will not be completed before the middle of 1944." The question, of course, is whether we can afford to wait until then.
A story in Friday’s New York Times says that government investigators are concerned enough about the "bottleneck" in production that they’re hearing testimony before a grand jury, which was launched on July 11. Thurman Arnold, head of the Justice Department’s anti-trust division, is quoted as saying that "the United States is facing the same situation that England faced -- a startling inadequacy of production."
A follow-up story in Saturday’s Times says Administration spokesmen, most prominent among them Secretary Stimsom and Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, claim that "the defense program had been slowed as a result of the 8 per cent profit limitation of the Vinson-Trammell act, and uncertainty over the rate of taxes to be levied against profits." Well, at least the Senate voted 71-7 ths week to authorize President Roosevelt to call up members of the National Guard to protect any Western Hemisphere country in an emergency. Now, all we have to do is find them some real guns.
THE NEED FOR DISCIPLINE. Walter Lippmann lays to rest a main tenet of the isolationist argument in his New York Herald Tribune column on Saturday --
"It will be a great pity if in discussing the the organization of the military power of the United States the objectors and the skeptics take to calling any measure ‘totalitarian’ if it applies to every one, ‘dictatorial’ if it applies compulsion, ‘Fascist’ if it provides authority, ‘Communist’ if it equalizes burdens, and so forth and so on. They are doing no service to the cause of freedom and democracy when they make it appear that only the sworn enemies of liberty can provide the discipline, the order, and authority and the sense of universal obligation which are indispensable to the survival of a nation. Nor is there any scintilla of historical truth in the assertion which is so frequently heard that free nations transform themselves into totalitarian states when they recognize the need for organization, discipline, and authority. Quite the contrary. In every instance -- Russia in 1918, Italy in 1922, Germany in 1933, France in 1940 -- it was feeble government, undiscipline, disorganization, impotence, calamity and defeat which lead directly to the loss of liberty."
No comments:
Post a Comment