BRITISH MARCH INTO LIBYA. Britain’s victorious troops in northern Africa haven’t paused for breath after clearing the Italians out of Egypt, according to a United Press dispatch published Monday. Mechanized forces have invaded Libya "through a desert sandstorm to carry the war into Italian-owned territory," says the U.P. Fort Capuzzo, just insider the Libyan border, now flies the Union Jack. The Fascist coastal base of Bardia is already said to be afire and under seize by British warships and bombers. Bardia is ten miles west of the Egyptian border. Italian forces are also reported to be reeling from heavy Royal Air Force attacks on Tobruk, just west of Bardia, and at Tripoli, a full 700 miles west of the front. The U.P. also says the British have taken an astounding 50,000 Italian prisoners in the week-long campaign.
And meanwhile, pressure by Greek troops in southern Albania is said to be caving in the center of the Italian line there, reports A.E. Angelopoulos of the International News Service. There’s speculation the Fascist high command is "preparing for a possible Dunkerque-like retreat through the port of Valona back to Italy."
This amazing collapse of Italian armed force makes one wonder if the Fascists might indeed be completely driven out. The Chicago Tribune notes editorially (and correctly, for a change), that German intervention in the African and Albanian battles might "restore the spirit of victory, but not the Italian pride" and reduce Italy to "a satellite and not a sun." However, "unless Hitler does intervene, Italy may not be able to repair the damages. The spirit of the people isn’t in the war and a bad winter with no mitigating military successes will not inspire them. It is probably futurist speculation to inquire what Hitler would do if Italy were to ask for a negotiated peace, what the Italians themselves, reverting to the king as the head of their government, would do to Mussolini if peace were proposed, and whether the British would want to come to terms with Mussolini or would prefer to keep him as a Nazi liability."
THE FOOD CONTROVERSY. David Anderson writes in Sunday’s New York Times that Britons are worried about proposals circulating in the U.S. to provide humanitarian shipments of food to Nazi-occupied countries in Europe. It’s a troubling question in both countries. Shouldn’t we try to do what we can to save starving civilian populations this winter, especially since Britain’s war policies are in part responsible for Europe’s food shortages? The answer isn’t an easy one, in light of the fact that Germany can appropriate foodstuffs from relief ships and convert them to military supplies, such as potatoes to alcohol, which could widely be used as a substitute for fuel oil. Also --
"What nettles the British people as much as anything is the futility, as they see it, of the argument. The situation of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway varies only in degree. Their plight may be desperate before the war is over, but the fault is seen clearly as Germany’s, since the food problem confronting them hinges mainly on the matter of distribution....No one denies that the motive is a good one, but all declare that it is based upon ‘misguided idealism’ at a time when ‘common sense’ can alone be trusted to save their country and they feel the United States as well....The blockade imposed by the British Navy is directed primarily at cutting off raw materials, oil, etc. It is not dictated by humanitarianism, but by the way the cards fall. The food blockade of Europe is a secondary factor."
Britain herself is getting by, writes Mr. Anderson, but not particularly well -- "The British housewife is now obliged to get along with a quarter pound of bacon per person per week, which will be cut so that the present three weeks’ supply stretches over four weeks. The sugar ration stands at a half pound, which is four ounces less than that of last Christmas. All fruits except oranges have been crossed off the import list."
DOES HE KNOW SOMETHING WE DON’T? Bruce Pinter reports in Monday’s New York Herald Tribune on President Roosevelt’s ominous farewell to the patients of the Warm Springs Foundation. After the visit with polio patients there on Sunday, the President vowed to spend two weeks with them next March "if the world survives." This was the same place where, just over eighteen months ago, F.D.R. concluded a customary visit to the Foundation by promising he’d be back in the fall, "if we don’t have a war." Isolationists made a lot of hay out of the President’s use of the first plural pronoun.
But there was a war in the fall. Will there still be a world next March?
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