THE ANNIVERSARY. William S. Shirer’s Berlin broadcast on C.B.S. last night dealt with how ordinary Germans are faring one year after the start of the war. The answer, overall, seems to be -- pretty well. Mr. Shirer says the German people are "better fed than a year ago," thanks to butter, bacon, and eggs from Denmark, vegetables from Holland, and Germany’s own stocks. (Of course, the people actually living in Denmark, Holland, and elsewhere are facing a bitter winter of acute food shortages). The clothing ration is one-and-a-half times what it was at the start of the war. And the "fantastic victories" of the last year have filled Germans with confidence that the war will be over before winter. And even if it isn’t, Mr. Shirer says that Berliners know full well this is a finish fight -- either they or the British will win total victory, and the losing side "will face lean days, to put it mildly."
THE LONDON BOMBINGS GO ON. The Associated Press is still calling the bombings of London "nuisance attacks," but if you read between the lines of the censored dispatches it sounds much worse. The radio says this morning there were seven air raid alarms yesterday in the British capital, as V-formations of Nazi bombers hit the city in daylight and night attacks. Raymond Daniell writes in Saturday’s New York Times that 700 warplanes raided the London area Friday, in four separate raids, comprising "the heaviest pounding the London area and Great Britain generally have received in the war to date." Edward Angly says in Saturday’s New York Herald Tribune the air war "is now being fought all around the clock and all over this island map." Another alarming report on the radio says that "thousands" of incendiary bombs were dropped on a northwestern British city Saturday. All around the papers, there are vague references to "losses of property and life," without any detail to speak of. Maybe we’re better off not knowing.
Meanwhile, C. Brooks Peters writes in Friday’s Times that Thursday’s R.A.F. raid on Berlin might not have hit any military targets, but it did damage in eight districts and "certainly brought home to residents of Berlin some comprehension of modern warfare with its sudden explosive death from the skies." More importantly, the bombings have "shattered the myth which has circulated through all strata of the population that Berlin is so well protected by antiaircraft batteries that it would not be possible for an enemy bomber to get within bomb-dropping distance of the city." Since their first attack on the Nazi capital one week ago, the British have been back almost every night. Dealing a blow to the morale of Berliners isn’t going to defeat Hitler in itself, but it’s surely some grim comfort right now to bomb-weary Britons to know the Nazis are being at least partially repaid for their "nuisances."
RUMANIA IS PARTITIONED -- AGAIN. It looks like just a matter of time before poor Rumania is driven off the map. The latest partition of her territory involves giving a large slice of Transylvania to Hungary, dictated to the Rumanians at a conference in Vienna on Friday. The whole thing smacks of another Munich. Actually, the Associated Press has a post-Munich analogy in mind, namely a meeting in the autumn of 1938 when Hitler resolved a Hungarian territorial "dispute" with Czecho-Slovakia in favor of the Hungarians. This latest land-grab gives Hungary back territory she lost in the World War.
Sigrid Schultz of the Chicago Tribune was at the Vienna Conference, and sums up in Saturday’s paper Rumania’s losses to three neighbors this year -- "This newest amputation of its national territory, combined with the loss of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to Russia and the already agreed to cession of southern Dobruja to Bulgaria, will have reduced Rumania from a nation of close to 20,000,000 people to one of about 15,000,000 within less than three months. All of this, too, without going thru a war. The agreement today cost Rumania about 2,000,000 of her population."
Alas, another Tribune story indicates it isn’t over yet -- "It now even is reported that the Jugo-Slavs have designs on Banet region in the southwest." And so yet another country seems fated to soon disappear from the map of Hitler’s "New Europe."
FRANCE’S COLONIES ARE DESERTING HER. The French surrender government at Vichy is losing territory, too, but for a different reason. And Washington Post columnist Barnet Nover writes Friday that if Britain keeps on putting up a stiff fight, the French Empire might find itself rapidly shrinking --
"Since the Franco-German armistice two months have elapsed. The British have not given up the struggle. On the contrary, the final Nazi triumph which loomed so close last June is out of sight today. And as long as the British fight on it must be apparent to all Frenchmen that only a British triumph can result in the reestablishment of an independent France....The Vichy government’s utter lack of prestige may explain why during the last few days a number of French colonies in Africa and the Pacific have broken away from Vichy and openly proclaimed their support of Great Britain in the war with Germany. These colonies include the Chad and Congo territories and the Cameroons in Equatorial Africa. Their strategic importance is said to be great. But great or not, the fact that these colonies have joined forces with Gen. de Gaulle and his committee constitutes something in the nature of a French vote of confidence in Great Britain, and a vote of no confidence in the men of Vichy. And there is a strong possibility that if the British continue to resist, the other parts of the French empire will follow their example."
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