A NEW ROUND OF INVASION JITTERS. It’s turned blustery and cold over the English Channel, but James B. Reston reports in Monday’s New York Times there might still be an opportunity for an invasion -- "the next few weeks should bring a second summer of temporary calm when conditions would be favorable should Fuehrer Hitler decide to risk an attack." This follows a report last week-end by Sigrid Schultz in the Chicago Tribune that the "growing fierceness" of the Nazi air raids on Britain is being interpreted by German officials as indication that an invasion is near. One Berlin insider tells her, "Germany can wait for the right moment to strike just as William the Conqueror’s fleet waited for favorable winds 874 years ago." By coincidence, or maybe not, William Shirer noted the other day in one of his C.B.S. broadcasts from Berlin that William launched his invasion during the middle of October. You get the feeling that some high-placed Nazis have been talking up William's exploits to the American press lately.
The main point of Mr. Reston’s story in the Times is that the R.A.F. isn’t waiting around to see what happens. Observers in southeastern Britain reported on Sunday "bomb flashes all along the French coast, especially around Boulogne, as British bombers flew through a heavy rainstorm to resume a counteroffensive which last night struck at Berlin, at Nazi-held ports from Wilhelmshaven to Le Havre, and at German railroads, munitions factories and airports." Meanwhile, the German and British airfleets continue "to swap blows in a kind of warfare that can go on indefinitely," says the Times. London was hit with a heavy raid Monday morning, after several days of small-scale attacks by lone bombers. And according to this morning’s radio reports, the British pounded Berlin for five hours last night, crossing and re-crossing the city.
AFTERMATH OF THE DEBACLE AT DAKAR. Last week, when the British and Free French gave up their attempted siege of Dakar in French West Africa, Britain’s government explained it did not want to launch "serious warlike operations against Frenchmen who felt it their duty to obey the commands of the Vichy government." That statement, coming after three days of fighting in which the Vichy French repulsed eight attempts to General de Gaulle’s men to secure a beachhead, didn’t note that the British Navy had indeed been conducting "serious warlike operations" in the form of a fierce offshore bombardment of the city. And it looked like a humiliating end, at least for now, to the combined British-Free French efforts to grab strategic French colonial territory before Axis armies could secure it.
But now the Associated Press reports that Britain has now threatened to blockade the French island colony of Madagascar, unless the local governor general turns his administrative duties over to the de Gaulle movement. He’s refused, and so far nothing else has happened. The A.P. notes that this is the second time Britain has attempted to secure Madagascar, and the first time, back in late July, was worthy of Chamberlain -- British troops attempted to land on the island, but withdrew when they were refused permission.
So has the Churchill government changed its mind toward Vichy in the last week, or are they saying to us with a straight face that a naval blockade is not a "serious warlike operation"? Or are they just impotently bluffing? I hope the British and Free French eventually succeed in taking over every single French colony out and keeping them out of Axis hands. But what can they expect to accomplish if they act like they're so afraid of a declaration of war from Petain, of all people, that they won’t do more than resort to threats and half-measures? What Britain will get from such a policy is more episodes like Dakar, which the Nazis will of course be delighted to exploit for propaganda.
HITLER’S PLAN FOR AMERICA. Dorothy Thompson writes in her New York Herald Tribune column Monday that the real significance of the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo pact is that it confirms the present war is really "a world revolution for the redistribution of the entire planet." And the signatories are pledged to a plan that will vastly reduce America’s role in world affairs, as revealed in a forthcoming book by Hitler’s former finance minister, Dr. Schacht, which the columnist obtained in outline form via Swedish sources --
"Dr. Schacht announces quite simply that the real objects of this war are the breaking of the ‘plutocracies’ -- namely, Great Britain and the United States. The Japanese angle reveals itself in the plan that after this war the United States is to have no interests whatsoever, commercial or otherwise, in the Pacific. We are to be allowed to trade exclusively with Europe -- which needs some of our products -- and with South America, where, far from having a ‘Sphere of Influence,’ we are to be apportioned ‘quotas.’ We are to be allowed to trade only through a monopolistic import-export syndicate, to be set up for the whole continent of Europe, necessitating the end of individual trading in this country and the establishment of a similar monopoly here. We shall be invited to stabilize our currencies together with Japan, Russia, and pan-Fascist Europe, and merge the banking system...For Latin America, which lives by exports, this system will mean economic strangulation or collaboration, and we shall eventually have the Axis at our gates."
Miss Thompson persuasively recommends that the U.S. take much more forceful action to counter this threat -- "This country needs allies. It needs them quickly and desperately....It is not and never has been a question of whether the British Empire needs us; it is a question whether we need the British Empire. We do....If Britain is defeated, we shall be alone against the world. Invaded or not invaded, we shall live on the terms of the conquerors and be back where we were in 1776....[our defense program] will not be adequate until we recognize a state of emergency and mobilize the entire man power, machine power, and money power of this country for defense, letting everything else take second place."
WHY WE MUST AID BRITAIN. Last week-end’s signing of the Axis tripartite agreement ought to be enough to convince any reasonable man that Britain is America’s first and most vital line of defense. But a lot of people, and not just head-in-the-sand isolationists, still talk as if the Battle of Britain is an abstract event, disconnected from our lives and our collective future. Nothing could be further from the truth. An editorial in the current New Republic summarizes this "sleep-walking effect" --
"Decades hence, men and women in the United States will look back with a curious poignant remembrance on the days through which they are now passing. Probably everyone has wondered what it would be like to live through the end of the world; yet now that we are coming so close to doing exactly that, most people seem hardly conscious of the indescribable significance and seriousness of these days. We read in the newspapers of seventy-one successive air raids on London within the space of a few weeks, and three minutes later we casually go on about our business....’If England falls,’ we say glibly at cocktail parties, discarding the proffered gin and looking around hastily for the Scotch. If England falls! That would be the most significant world happening since the battle of Hastings almost nine and a half centuries ago....If England falls, life in the United States will be utterly translated, as much so as if the land and all the people in it had been moved to the ends of the earth. We must sacrifice as we have never done in our history, not even in the Great War, sacrifice merely in the hope of being able to protect what we have, of keeping such a degree of freedom as we have painfully achieved."
The New Republic is far too pessimistic about what America can do to help Britain ("We who watch from this distance, able to do little to affect the outcome and doing less than little, are benumbed by the uproar of a battle that is so far away and yet so terribly close."). If we were truly so impotent to affect the outcome of the war, Lord Lothian wouldn’t have wasted his breath pleading this week with President Roosevelt for "more of everything -- and quickly." Right now, our best chance of staying out of war is to give Britain all the ships, planes, and guns she asks for, so that America doesn’t face the undivided and hungry attention of powerful dictatorships to our east and west.
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