FRENCH "COUP" FAILS, LAVAL FIRED. The radio news this morning offers sketchy reports of government upheaval in Vichy France, with the big loser said to be the archly pro-Nazi foreign minister, Pierre Laval. Neutral correspondents are hearing despite strictest censorship that M. Laval plotted to get the country’s "leader", Marshal Petain, moved from Vichy to Paris, as the Marshal desires. Once the Petain regime was set up in Paris, the story goes, Laval would have declared himself the head of a new government, seizing power over all of unoccupied France. He might have even gone to the extent of declaring war on Britain, something the Germans would be very happy to see. But for now, Laval frets under house arrest at his estate just outside Vichy, watched by members of France’s fascist-style elite police corp.
I’ve heard little speculation so far as to just what this means. I suppose optimists might call it another reflection of the current wave of Axis setbacks in the war. Surely Marshal Petain would be vehemently opposed to a weakened France entering the war on Germany’s side, especially with Nazi victory more uncertain than ever. But I can’t believe that Hitler would sit idly by and let Laval, one of his more useful puppet statesmen, be treated so shabbily when Germany holds all the cards in this part of Europe.
TODAY’S ITALIAN DEFEATS (III). A dispatch from Rome in Saturday’s New York Herald Tribune says that the Fascist press has been quietly preparing Italians for some big, bad news. Readers of independent newspapers already know what it is -- Britain has abruptly, rudely, violently thrown the Italians out of western Egypt, in just a few days’ time. Not only has the Italian Army’s seventy-five-mile march eastward to Sidi Barrani been completely wiped out, but some reports say this morning that the British have also just taken Fort Capuzzo, just inside Libya. According to Phillip S. Tayler of United Press, five Italian divisions totally about 75,000 men were all but cut off from Libya by a fierce British naval assault on Solum, just inside Egypt. The Italians’ food and oil supplies were seized by British troops attacking from the desert south, and they fought a desperate rear-guard action to escape encirclement. But many of them quit in the end -- the Associated Press reports the British Army has taken over 40,000 Fascist prisoners in this brief blitz campaign.
Herbert L. Matthews says in effect in Saturday’s New York Times that Mussolini’s regime is pathetically blaming "defeatists" for reverses on the battlefield. The Times’ story quotes one Italian newspaper as raging against "frequenters of bars, salons and banquets who listen to the British radio." Ludicrously, the Rome radio warns, in a broadcast monitored by C.B.S., that British troops had better watch out or they’ll make the Italian Army mad -- "The Italian is a light-hearted and easy-going fellow until he is aroused. Sometimes what he needs is just a little slap, then he stands up and fights to a finish, and the more blows the more dangerous he becomes. The British ought to remember this." Scary, eh?
Those easy-going fellows on the Albanian front have lost yet another battle against the Greeks, being forced to give up Porto Palermo. The city’s Fascist defenders are now under heavy bombardment as they retreat thirty miles northward toward Valona, Albania’s second-biggest port. There, Italian cargo ships, also under near-continuous bomber attack, wait to evacuate what’s left of their army. The only troubling sign in all this for the Greeks is a note in Sam Brewer’s account, in Saturday’s Chicago Tribune, of how the Greeks pushed the Italian Army out of Greek territory. Mr. Brewer writes -- "Among the Greek troops there is a shortage of blankets and warm clothing. The men are now going on short rations because of the shortage in trucks and seven days of heavy rains, which make transportation all the more difficult."
TWO VIEWS ON OUR "SLUMP." If you don’t want to get depressed about the state of the war and the status of national preparedness, don’t read this week’s Time magazine article on the subject --
"The prevailing mood in Washington was gloom. Apprehensively the country read the Washington columnists, whose reports of U.S. defense preparations read last week like the opening chapters of so many ghost stories. ‘We are in a pause,’ gloomed Columnist Ray Clapper (Scripps-Howard). ‘Slump,’ wailed Columnist Dorothy Thompson (New York Herald Tribune), who printed reports that the President is in a ‘down’ mood....Lifting censorship revealed England harder-hit than most had realized. Reports came, true or false, that Nazi Germany’s war-making capacity was actually increasing, and increasing faster than that of Great Britain and the U.S. put together. Japan teetered at the edge of a war plunge into the rich islands of the Western Pacific. England was running out of merchant ships, its very life line to the food, supplies, war materials of the U.S.....When would U.S. capacity be great enough to meet any defense task? The soonest possible date was late autumn 1941 -- ten months. Many men believed Hitler would try for a knockout blow of England in April. Between Hitler’s April and America’s October stretched a hell-to-pay period that no man could foresee, that few dared to contemplate."
Chilling thoughts, those. But a New York Herald Tribune editorial says our attack of the blues is a thing of the past, and they credit Hitler’s speech last week with administering a pick-me-up to the U.S. – "The slump into which many Americans fell after the election is unquestionably over....It is, primarily, events which have caused this revival of courage and common sense. In the first rank must be placed Mr. Hitler’s own self-revelation. In this latest utterance Der Fuehrer made it clear beyond any possibility of doubting that he is fighting not just England but the whole democratic world, including , specifically, the United States. Words could not make the challenge clearer. The pleasant theory that after the Nazis have conquered England this country could strike hands with them and do business comfortably in their world received a rude and final rejection in this speech....It happens that here and now the best chance of keeping this country out of war is to aid Great Britain to the limit and with all speed."
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