Sunday, December 1, 1940

CHAOS ENGULFS RUMANIA. It’s hard to tell from the week-end papers what exactly is going on in Rumania, but as best I can figure it seems to be an embryonic civil war. The strange part is that both sides of this conflict are in Hitler’s pocket. A Fascist militia, the Iron Guard, is said by the United Press to be fighting in several cities with units of the Rumanian Army. At Ploesti, in the heart of the oil fields, the Guardists have murdered some 2,000 Jews and leftists, reports the U.P. German government sources show no loyalty to Rumanian dictator General Antonescu, even though he has expressed support for the Reich and signed Rumania over to the Axis camp just last month. Now, the Nazis say the General’s authority has virtually broken down. In desperation, the government has ordered several Rumanian Army units to march to Bucharest, where street fighting has killed at least sixty-seven so far.

It’s anyone’s guess exactly how this is all going to come out, but it’s hard to see anyone "winning" in Rumania other than Hitler. He probably doesn’t want to rule directly over the Magyar kingdom, since that might distract his armies from more important duty elsewhere in the Balkans. But since virtually all of the participants in these chaotic battles look to the Nazis for support, there’s little doubt that Germany will be able to continue her "background rule" in Rumania once this mess is settled.

IS A NEGOTIATED PEACE POSSIBLE? Last Wednesday the Chicago Tribune, which has championed the idea of a compromise peace throughout this war, editorialized on the subject again to contend there can be no military solution ("If a present day peace cannot be obtained by any possible compromises it must also be said that there is no more prospect of reaching a favorable decision by arms."). Meanwhile, a series of articles written for the Scripps-Howard papers by Ludwell Denny claims there is an underground clamor in Europe for a negotiated settlement. This is supposedly being blocked by the stubbornness of Prime Minister Churchill and the Roosevelt Administration, but Mr. Denny adds that "conditions may change."

Such a peace would be an unprecedented horror for the United States, not to mention Britain, and nobody’s said it better this past week than New York Herald Tribune columnist Dorothy Thompson, writing in Friday’s editions --

"The negotiated ‘peace’...would deprive the United States of the only friend and ally we have in the world. The Churchill government would fall. Hitler would not make peace with Churchill, even if Churchill would. Not once in his whole lifetime has Hitler carried on a campaign against a personality with whom he hoped to cooperate. When he wanted to subjugate Czecho-Slovakia he turned the press and radio loose on the man he first wanted to eliminate: Benes. Before that, he had done the same thing with Schuschnigg. It is significant that never, not once, did he, or has he personally attacked Stalin. But over and over again he has attacked Churchill and Roosevelt. He wants the elimination of these two men and the policies they represent. The resignation of Churchill would be as essential to peace negotiations as was the resignation of the men above named. Churchill would have to be followed by a pro-Nazi government. A pro-Nazi government in England, entering into a ‘junior partnership’ with the Third Reich, would not make peace in the world. It would further pursue the war. And the moment such a ‘peace’ were settled the United States of America would be in the most hideous danger imaginable. For that moment would be the one in which Japan would enter as actively into the Axis partnership as Italy entered it with the defeat of France."

Miss Thompson’s prescription is bleak, but prudent -- "The only possible hope for the United States to avoid the worst catastrophe in the history of the Nation is to abandon all wishful thinking and realize that we must not allow Britain to lose the war. This does not even mean that we can guarantee that she, or even we, can win it. It means that there will be no peace except a peace which leaves us together -- Britain and America -- in a more powerful world position than it does the Axis."

JAPAN’S LOUSY AIR FORCE. The Greeks continue their advance into Albania, revealing Fascist Italy’s military weaknesses for all the world to see. And the New Republic’s T.R.B. column strikes a hopeful note of a different sort this week -- lobbyists in the nation’s capital pumping for greater aid to China make a convincing case that Japanese air power is the "softest spot" of the Axis. Japanese planes, the argument goes, would be chased from the skies if the U.S. and British air forces worked together to donate a number of "semi-obsolete planes" to Chiang Kai-shek’s military --

"The partisans of China make three points. The first is a familiar one that the Japanese, as a race, are bad airmen, awkward, slow, clumsy. This has a mystic sound, but it is abundantly attested to by foreign military observers. Second, there is every reason to think that Japanese fighting aircraft, in design, are some two years behind those of other major powers. Finally, although Japan may have succeeded in putting aside a store of high-test American aviation gasoline, thise reserve must be small, and, in active fighting, would be quickly exhausted." Chiang’s aviators, say the pro-China crowd, could with a modest number of planes "sweep Japan’s aviation from the skies and carry the attack to her home islands," halting Japan’s push southward toward the Dutch East Indies and Singapore.

Prior to now I would have dismissed this kind of talk as giddily over-optimistic, but with Italy’s recent reverses in the eastern Mediterranean, and Japan's ongoing stalemate in China, it’s at least possible to believe that the warmongering braggadocio of Japanese military leaders might not be backed up by nearly as much power as they imagine it to be.