FRANCE ASKS FOR TERMS. The Reynaud government has fallen and Vice Premier Petain is now in charge of what's left of France. This morning's radio reports say that the new government, now located in Bordeaux, has asked Hitler for terms. The Petain regime is seeking “an honorable peace,” but the Germans have not yet replied. William L. Shirer, reporting from occupied Paris last night for the C.B.S., says that Parisians were “almost struck dead” by the news, which came in the form of a broadcast by Marshal Petain -- for which the Germans helpfully provided loud speaker trucks placed around the capital. A report this morning quotes the new Interior Minister, Paul Baudoin, as saying, “We are ready to lay down arms if we can get honorable peace.”
It's not clear what Petain's ministers mean by “honorable peace.” One big question mark in any armistice is the fate of the French fleet. The Nazis would love to get their hands on these ships, and the British would love to help France's navy escape from German clutches and continue the war at Britain's side. If it's true, as Monday's New York Times says, that “elements of the new regime incline toward a policy of appeasement,” the fleet might well be turned over in return for, say, some measure of continued French autonomy (though the Nazis have shown many times over they're willing to cheat on or discard their promises when it suits them).
Then again, we should remember what happened in Norway, where King Haakon's government was poised to capitulate to the Germans very early in the fight -- until Hitler caustically threw terms at them too harsh for any sane leader to accept. If the Germans haven't yet learned their lesson in this regard, the French government still could, ultimately, move to North Africa and continue the fight.
THE FRONT FALLS APART. It doesn't appear that, whatever the French government decides, they'll be able to keep up the fight much longer within France. Over the week-end newsmen predicted the French would soon make a stand on the Loire River in central France. But by Monday the Germans already crossed the Loire and were fighting for Orleans, which is the northernmost city on the Loire and seventy-five miles south of Paris. Monday's French war communique says the French are putting up “desperate resistance” along the middle part of the Loire, but apparently there is no longer a single organized line of defense. The radio also says this morning that Nazi armor has stabbed deeper into the heart of France, reaching two cities east of the Loire, Dijon and Autum, which are 150 to 175 miles southeast of Paris.
Meanwhile, the Maginot Line is no more. Sigrid Schultz writes in Monday's Chicago Tribune that the Germans have come within sixty miles of encircling the massive defense barrier and cutting off its 500,000 French defenders. But a later Associated Press report in some of Monday's editions says the French have secretly managed to withdraw most of their men from the Line, “to make an open stand with the army of General Maxime Weygand on a line west from the French Jura mountains.” The A.P. also says that “German legions penetrating the line found it almost empty.”
BRITAIN PREPARES FOR A FINISH FIGHT. According to James M. Minifie in Monday’s New York Herald Tribune, the British Foreign Office has responded to the fall of the Reynaud government with “a grim statement of Great Britain’s resolution to fight on until victory was won, even if it should take years.” The British may have one sound reason to hope for eventual victory, if they can only survive intact through the next few critical months. As Mr. Minifie writes, “The scale with which Germany is burning up her resources, it was pointed out, means that the Reich must win in a few months or never, whereas British strength in trained men, mechanized equipment and airplanes is growing ‘with increasing momentum.’” More men have been called to service during the last five weeks than at any time during the Empire’s history.
But while Britain’s government still hopes that the French fleet will carry on the fight, or that the new Petain regime will continue the struggle from North Africa, it’s recognized that for the foreseeable future Britain will either shoulder most of the Allies’ war burden -- or will fight on completely alone. Britons have been warned that “the war may be directed almost exclusively against these islands and that they must be prepared to face the prospect of invasion.”
CHURCHILL’S “SECRET MESSAGE.” The last week-end of the Reynaud government was apparently marked by furious debate over what the Associated Press called a “secret” message of “great importance” from Prime Minister Churchill. Monday reports didn’t offer any hints of what was in the Churchill proposal. But radio reports this morning indicate it was a stunner -- a plan to merge the French and British empires into a single sovereign state. The new Franco-British union would pool the two countries’ resources to continue fighting Hitler with a combined army, navy, and air force. Moreover, every Frenchman would become a British citizen, and every Briton a French citizen.
The reports indicate that Reynaud endorsed the “solemn plan of union,” having sent General de Gaulle to London to complete the agreement with Churchill during the week-end. The premier argued desperately to get his cabinet to accept it. But when they refused, he resigned, and the government promptly issued its plea to Hitler for an “honorable peace.”
LINDBERGH’S WHITE BROTHERHOOD. I’ve read the transcript of Colonel Lindbergh’s fourth radio address, as printed in Sunday’s Washington Post. Three jarring statements jumped out --
“Shall we continue this suicidal conflict between western nations and white races, or shall we learn from history as well as from modern Europe that a civilization cannot be preserved by conflict among its own peoples, regardless of how different their ideologies might be?” (In other words, never mind about Hitler’s years of lies, treaty-breakings, and brutal aggressions against Czecho, Poland, Belgium, France, etc. The only important thing is that he’s a white man.)
“If the British Navy could not support an invasion of Norway against the German air force, there is little reason for us to worry about an invasion of America, as long as our own air force is adequately maintained.” (Refresh my memory again -- just who “invaded” Norway?)
“We must insist on military bases being placed wherever they are needed for our safety, regardless of who owns the territory involved.” (Stalin and Hitler couldn’t have said it better -- there’s no reason to bother with the “rights” of those pesky little neutral countries.)
WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT? Hanson W. Baldwin looks at the possibilities of a climactic German-British battle in a Sunday New York Times analysis. His best guess is a possibility that sounds realistic -- and depressing -- but hasn’t been discussed much so far --
“It seems certain that if Herr Hitler tries either invasion or attrition he will strike hard and perhaps with new weapons; it seems certain that England will be in deadly peril and perhaps may succumb, but it seems equally certain that Herr Hitler may dig his own grave. If he tries attrition, the struggle may be long; it will be blockade against blockade, with Britain attempting to blockade a continent with superior sea power, Hitler blockading an island with air power and submarines. If he tries invasion ‘all bets are off,’ for not since 1066, when Harold of England died at Hastings with an arrow through his eye before the victorious hosts of William the Conqueror, has history recorded a similar situation. There is a third possibility -- and it is, perhaps, more likely than the other two. The war may become a stalemate; Britain greatly suffering, greatly weakened; Germany also weakened, or ready -- in order to avoid that weakening -- to arrange a peace that would insure her continued dominance of the mainland of Europe. In such an eventuality the world might again face another Napoleonic era, with Britain facing alone a seething continent; first, perhaps in an armed truce, then in another recrudescence of war.”
Saturday, June 18, 2016
Thursday, June 16, 2016
Sunday, June 16, 1940
PARIS FALLS. Even with all the warning that it was coming, and even with all the terrible news of the last five weeks, this is almost too dumbfounding for words.
German troops marched into Paris on Friday. Despite an earlier report in the Chicago Tribune that the French were preparing a Warsaw-like last stand in the capital, the French government declared Paris an open city Thursday and decided not to make a defense on the outskirts. (That in itself prompts very mixed feelings of regret and relief). Friday’s papers carried the first word, from U.S. Ambassador Bullitt, who had remained at his post in Paris and telephoned the news to the State Department that the Nazis had arrived. The New York Times’ C. Brooks Peters begins his Saturday dispatch from Berlin with the chilling words, “Today, for the third time within the last century and a quarter, victorious German troops marched into Paris....They are the bearers of a proposed new order for Europe and perhaps the world, a major tenet of which is to destroy the old one.”
A Washington Post editorial describes with frightening frankness what civilization is now up against -- “The history of our times shows no parallel for this stupendous German victory. There is no precedent for the amazing organization, the smashing power, the almost superhuman energy with which a small and impoverished country has burst through its frontiers, has broken down all resistance and now tramples the prostate civilization of France....A testing period, such as is seldom given a generation to endure, now lies ahead. To meet it successfully will require sacrifice, courage, good judgment and above all integrity of purpose.”
IS THE FRENCH FRONT COLLAPSING? There’s an alarming note from G.H. Archambault in Saturday’s New York Times -- “It is impossible tonight to indicate the present front even approximately. It is really one long line of pockets and salients, a situation calling for great qualities of generalship in order to preserve cohesion of the French forces.” Radio reports this morning indicate the Germans are racing southward across the Seine “on the broadest front,” to quote the German military communique. Saturday’s map in the New York Herald Tribune shows the Nazis fifty miles north of Chaumont, which is in the rear of the now-endangered Maginot Line. The radio news today says they’ve reached it. (Chaumont, by the way, is 135 miles southeast of Paris). According to the Associated Press, the French are fighting back with “desperate fury,” but their only success this week-end in stopping the Germans has been in repulsing a blistering Nazi assault in the Saar region, in front of the Maginot Line.
In addition to Paris and Chaumont, the Germans have taken Montmedy, the northern anchor of the Maginot Line, and Verdun, site of one of the most famous Allied stands of the World War. On the western part of the front, Nazi troops have seized the port of Le Havre and reached Versailles. The main danger at the moment is the armored spearhead at Chaumont -- if the Germans continue their advance at this rate of speed, the Maginot Line, and its million French defenders, will be cut off from the rest of France in another two to three days.
A COMING “BATTLE OF THE LOIRE”... Several of Saturday’s press accounts mention the Loire River, which runs through the western half of France’s midsection, as being the next logical place for France to mount a stable defense. An Associated Press dispatch from Tours says the river, which runs through Tours and Orleans, is “a strong natural barrier.” (Orleans is also on the northernmost pont of the Loire, some seventy miles below Paris.) Perhaps in view of making a stand on the Loire, this, the French government, which fled last week from Paris to Tours, is on the move again -- this time some 250 miles further south, to Bordeaux.
The New York Times says Saturday, “With the withdrawal of the French troops charged with the defense of Paris the first phase of the Battle of France was ended in defeat. It may be called the Battle of the Seine. The next phase may be the Battle of the Loire.”
...OR A CAPITULATION. Skepticism is starting to show up in the press that France will continue the fight much longer, at least in her homeland. The Associated Press calls the military moves by French armies south of Paris “a fighting retreat that may be their last movement of the war.” The Germans are crowing that the end is near. Sigrid Schultz of the Chicago Tribune quotes German military authorities as saying the latest Nazi advances prove that “the moral resistance of the French troops has been crippled.” Ralph W. Barnes writes from Berlin in Saturday's New York Herald Tribune that words like “rout and “debacle” are now being applied by the Nazi high command to the situation of the French Army. The United Press cites Nazi leaders as boasting that France will “be beaten to her knees” in another ten days.
REYNAUD BEGS U.S. FOR “CLOUDS” OF WARPLANES. Before the French government fled Tours, Premier Reynaud made a broadcast Thursday night pleading for American intervention. “We know what a high place ideals hold in the life of the American people,” he said. “Will they hesitate yet to declare themselves against Nazi Germany?” Three days after pleading with President Roosevelt to provide every kind of aid short of a U.S. expeditionary force, the Premier declared, “It is necessary that clouds of airplanes come across the Atlantic to crush the evil power that has descended over Europe.” The New York Times says the French need 5,000 planes, which is many, many more than the U.S. has. In response, according to Friday’s Chicago Tribune, the President says the U.S. is doing everything possible to help, but that only Congress can make a military alliance.
According to Larry Rue in Friday’s Chicago Tribune, the British are trying to cheer themselves up with talk of what an American declaration of war could do to bolster the Allied cause. The London News Chronicle is quoted as exulting, “A declaration of war by America now would inject an impulse of bounding hope into every Frenchman’s heart. The effect on the Nazis would be correspondingly depressing. Now, in this momentous crisis, America may have it in her power to tide civilization over its darkest hour by a strong dramatic act.”
THE FRENCH SCORN AMERICAN SYMPATHY. Sonia Tomara, the New York Herald Tribune’s Paris correspondent, writes a harrowing tale in Saturday’s paper about her attempt to flee southward with her sister and a doctor who had been treating refugees. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising, but it is, a little, that she hasn’t found any good will toward America --
“The French people I talked with along the route from Paris expressed their disappointment at the inaction of the United States. They feel that in spite of all the sympathy and moral support of the American people, France has been left alone to fight a much superior enemy. ‘We alone are to defend civilization,’ they said, ‘completely alone.’ French censorship has withheld the fact that President Roosevelt said his heart was with the Allies, for such a statement would appear as the worst irony to the French. The general feeling is: ‘We are tired of moral support and of sympathy. Let the Americans keep their heart to themselves. We don’t need it alone. We need planes to fight the German planes that are mowing down our men.’”
Miss Tomara eventually made it, by car and on foot, to Tours, where she filed this dispatch in the middle of a Nazi air raid. She writes in closing, “The catastrophe that has befallen France has no parallel in human history. Nobody knows how or when it will end. Like the other refugees, and there are millions of us, I do not know tonight when I shall sleep in a bed again, or how I will get out of this town.”
AMERICA CAN’T STOP THE NAZIS -- YET. George Soule writes in last week’s New Republic that there’s actually very little that the U.S. could do to crush Hitlerism in the coming months, unless the Allies, or at least Britain, somehow manage to hold on --
“Much as we should like to end Nazism in Europe, we are not ready to do it. We could not possibly be ready before the decisive battles of the present war are fought. If Hitler wins these, nothing less than an overwhelmingly powerful air force, a navy big enough to whip the combined navies of all possible opponents and to operate on the other side of the Atlantic, an army of not less than five million men on the front lines, trained, equipped, and supplied, and a fleet of transports about as large as the combined merchant fleets of the world, would be safe preparation. I do not put such a daring conquest beyond the capacities of the American people if they earnestly subordinated everything else to it, but they would surely not be prepared to try it before five or perhaps ten years. If this is what we are arming for, we shall have to spend not less then $25,000,000,000 annually on military preparations, or from one-quarter to one-half of our national income....We shall have to organize our whole national life about a war economy and sacrifice all other pursuits. I doubt if we have, or shall develop, sufficiently firm resolution for such an endeavor. If the Allies are not defeated within a few months, we may help to turn the scales by measures short of war, though it is a little difficult to see how we can open this door much wider to them than we already have done.”
German troops marched into Paris on Friday. Despite an earlier report in the Chicago Tribune that the French were preparing a Warsaw-like last stand in the capital, the French government declared Paris an open city Thursday and decided not to make a defense on the outskirts. (That in itself prompts very mixed feelings of regret and relief). Friday’s papers carried the first word, from U.S. Ambassador Bullitt, who had remained at his post in Paris and telephoned the news to the State Department that the Nazis had arrived. The New York Times’ C. Brooks Peters begins his Saturday dispatch from Berlin with the chilling words, “Today, for the third time within the last century and a quarter, victorious German troops marched into Paris....They are the bearers of a proposed new order for Europe and perhaps the world, a major tenet of which is to destroy the old one.”
A Washington Post editorial describes with frightening frankness what civilization is now up against -- “The history of our times shows no parallel for this stupendous German victory. There is no precedent for the amazing organization, the smashing power, the almost superhuman energy with which a small and impoverished country has burst through its frontiers, has broken down all resistance and now tramples the prostate civilization of France....A testing period, such as is seldom given a generation to endure, now lies ahead. To meet it successfully will require sacrifice, courage, good judgment and above all integrity of purpose.”
IS THE FRENCH FRONT COLLAPSING? There’s an alarming note from G.H. Archambault in Saturday’s New York Times -- “It is impossible tonight to indicate the present front even approximately. It is really one long line of pockets and salients, a situation calling for great qualities of generalship in order to preserve cohesion of the French forces.” Radio reports this morning indicate the Germans are racing southward across the Seine “on the broadest front,” to quote the German military communique. Saturday’s map in the New York Herald Tribune shows the Nazis fifty miles north of Chaumont, which is in the rear of the now-endangered Maginot Line. The radio news today says they’ve reached it. (Chaumont, by the way, is 135 miles southeast of Paris). According to the Associated Press, the French are fighting back with “desperate fury,” but their only success this week-end in stopping the Germans has been in repulsing a blistering Nazi assault in the Saar region, in front of the Maginot Line.
In addition to Paris and Chaumont, the Germans have taken Montmedy, the northern anchor of the Maginot Line, and Verdun, site of one of the most famous Allied stands of the World War. On the western part of the front, Nazi troops have seized the port of Le Havre and reached Versailles. The main danger at the moment is the armored spearhead at Chaumont -- if the Germans continue their advance at this rate of speed, the Maginot Line, and its million French defenders, will be cut off from the rest of France in another two to three days.
A COMING “BATTLE OF THE LOIRE”... Several of Saturday’s press accounts mention the Loire River, which runs through the western half of France’s midsection, as being the next logical place for France to mount a stable defense. An Associated Press dispatch from Tours says the river, which runs through Tours and Orleans, is “a strong natural barrier.” (Orleans is also on the northernmost pont of the Loire, some seventy miles below Paris.) Perhaps in view of making a stand on the Loire, this, the French government, which fled last week from Paris to Tours, is on the move again -- this time some 250 miles further south, to Bordeaux.
The New York Times says Saturday, “With the withdrawal of the French troops charged with the defense of Paris the first phase of the Battle of France was ended in defeat. It may be called the Battle of the Seine. The next phase may be the Battle of the Loire.”
...OR A CAPITULATION. Skepticism is starting to show up in the press that France will continue the fight much longer, at least in her homeland. The Associated Press calls the military moves by French armies south of Paris “a fighting retreat that may be their last movement of the war.” The Germans are crowing that the end is near. Sigrid Schultz of the Chicago Tribune quotes German military authorities as saying the latest Nazi advances prove that “the moral resistance of the French troops has been crippled.” Ralph W. Barnes writes from Berlin in Saturday's New York Herald Tribune that words like “rout and “debacle” are now being applied by the Nazi high command to the situation of the French Army. The United Press cites Nazi leaders as boasting that France will “be beaten to her knees” in another ten days.
REYNAUD BEGS U.S. FOR “CLOUDS” OF WARPLANES. Before the French government fled Tours, Premier Reynaud made a broadcast Thursday night pleading for American intervention. “We know what a high place ideals hold in the life of the American people,” he said. “Will they hesitate yet to declare themselves against Nazi Germany?” Three days after pleading with President Roosevelt to provide every kind of aid short of a U.S. expeditionary force, the Premier declared, “It is necessary that clouds of airplanes come across the Atlantic to crush the evil power that has descended over Europe.” The New York Times says the French need 5,000 planes, which is many, many more than the U.S. has. In response, according to Friday’s Chicago Tribune, the President says the U.S. is doing everything possible to help, but that only Congress can make a military alliance.
According to Larry Rue in Friday’s Chicago Tribune, the British are trying to cheer themselves up with talk of what an American declaration of war could do to bolster the Allied cause. The London News Chronicle is quoted as exulting, “A declaration of war by America now would inject an impulse of bounding hope into every Frenchman’s heart. The effect on the Nazis would be correspondingly depressing. Now, in this momentous crisis, America may have it in her power to tide civilization over its darkest hour by a strong dramatic act.”
THE FRENCH SCORN AMERICAN SYMPATHY. Sonia Tomara, the New York Herald Tribune’s Paris correspondent, writes a harrowing tale in Saturday’s paper about her attempt to flee southward with her sister and a doctor who had been treating refugees. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising, but it is, a little, that she hasn’t found any good will toward America --
“The French people I talked with along the route from Paris expressed their disappointment at the inaction of the United States. They feel that in spite of all the sympathy and moral support of the American people, France has been left alone to fight a much superior enemy. ‘We alone are to defend civilization,’ they said, ‘completely alone.’ French censorship has withheld the fact that President Roosevelt said his heart was with the Allies, for such a statement would appear as the worst irony to the French. The general feeling is: ‘We are tired of moral support and of sympathy. Let the Americans keep their heart to themselves. We don’t need it alone. We need planes to fight the German planes that are mowing down our men.’”
Miss Tomara eventually made it, by car and on foot, to Tours, where she filed this dispatch in the middle of a Nazi air raid. She writes in closing, “The catastrophe that has befallen France has no parallel in human history. Nobody knows how or when it will end. Like the other refugees, and there are millions of us, I do not know tonight when I shall sleep in a bed again, or how I will get out of this town.”
AMERICA CAN’T STOP THE NAZIS -- YET. George Soule writes in last week’s New Republic that there’s actually very little that the U.S. could do to crush Hitlerism in the coming months, unless the Allies, or at least Britain, somehow manage to hold on --
“Much as we should like to end Nazism in Europe, we are not ready to do it. We could not possibly be ready before the decisive battles of the present war are fought. If Hitler wins these, nothing less than an overwhelmingly powerful air force, a navy big enough to whip the combined navies of all possible opponents and to operate on the other side of the Atlantic, an army of not less than five million men on the front lines, trained, equipped, and supplied, and a fleet of transports about as large as the combined merchant fleets of the world, would be safe preparation. I do not put such a daring conquest beyond the capacities of the American people if they earnestly subordinated everything else to it, but they would surely not be prepared to try it before five or perhaps ten years. If this is what we are arming for, we shall have to spend not less then $25,000,000,000 annually on military preparations, or from one-quarter to one-half of our national income....We shall have to organize our whole national life about a war economy and sacrifice all other pursuits. I doubt if we have, or shall develop, sufficiently firm resolution for such an endeavor. If the Allies are not defeated within a few months, we may help to turn the scales by measures short of war, though it is a little difficult to see how we can open this door much wider to them than we already have done.”
Monday, June 13, 2016
Thursday, June 13, 1940
NAZIS AT THE GATES OF PARIS. William Shirer reported in his C.B.S. broadcast from Berlin last night that the Germans are now only twelve and a half miles from Paris. This is within artillery range, and it’s closer than they came in 1914. For the first time since 1870, he said, “a German army is literally at the gates of Paris.” A radio report this morning puts the Nazi armies at ten miles from the capital’s northern suburbs. Parisians who are left in the half-deserted city have a harder time getting information on where the Germans are -- the only morning paper still publishing in the city is the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune, and it’s printed in English.
Is there any hope left of saving Paris from occupation? An Associated Press report Wednesday says the British still think so, and are sending “every gun that can shoot” and every available man to the French front. Harold Denny writes in Wednesday’s New York Times that the British were still hoping yesterday for a new “miracle of the Marne,” on par with the gallant French stand twenty-six years on the Marne River which saved Paris in the nick of time, after the Kaiser’s troops had closed to within twenty miles. A gallant Allied defense along the Marne saved the capital from the German offensive of 1918 as well. Mindful of this, Wednesday’s Washington Post headlines the fighting as the “Third Battle of the Marne” -- expressing an editorial hope, it seems, that the same thing might happen again.
GERMANS ADVANCE ON A WIDE FRONT. Alas, this morning’s radio reports make it clear that France’s defenses south of the Marne aren’t holding. Nor are they holding in other places, for that matter. Last night’s war communique from the French high command (now headquartered south of Paris in the Loire Valley) says Nazi tanks have stormed across the Marne just east of the capital and south of Chateau-Thierry. Twenty miles northwest of Paris, the invaders have reached Beaumont, passing the line of their 1914 advance. Farther east, the Germans have taken Rheims, the famed cathedral city smashed in the World War which had been re-built with American funds. This Nazi force is pushing southwestward toward Verdun, threatening to outflank the Maginot Line. In the west, the French are fighting desperately to contain a forty-mile-wide German break-through to the Seine which threatens Paris with encirclement.
PARIS PREPARES FOR A SIEGE. Alex Small writes from Paris for the Chicago Tribune that the poilus are preparing to bitterly contest the capital --
“While contesting every inch of ground in the fierce encounter going on in the lower stretches of the Seine river and the middle distances of the Marne river, Gen. Maxime Weygand’s men are forging an iron ring around Paris. It faces not only to the north but for miles and miles to the south, and it appears the world will see a spectacular siege. The French do not intend to give up even if the two German thrusts down to the east and west of Paris penetrate deeper and deeper in an encircling movement. Every road leading into Paris, from all points of the compass, is being blocked, entrenched, and barricaded for a heroic defense that may make the struggle which the Basques put up two years ago at Bilbao, Spain, look like a minor episode. Along the highways junk and machinery have been parked across roadways in echelons, and machine gun nests and trenches have been constructed in woods and other places.”
One feels horrified for the prospect of Paris' great monuments -- the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, Notre Dame, so many others -- being threatened with complete destruction. And the Nazis have warned that if Frenchmen defend Paris they “will bear full responsibility” for whatever happens. Yet you have to admire the courage of the French in preparing for this desperate battle.
FRENCH TROOPS ARRIVE TO DEFEND PARIS. Walter Kerr offers a haunting (and partially censored) word-picture from Paris in Wednesday’s New York Herald Tribune of the terrible exodus of French civilians, and the arrival of exhausted troops to take up the city’s defense --
“All night and all day men, women, and children piled out of town by train, bus, truck, automobile, bicycle, baby carriage, and on foot. They took with them what they could -- everything from a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine for the evening meal to mattresses, chairs, clothing, bird cages, dogs and cats. And almost as the last of them were leaving (here 95 words were censored, and the dispatch continued with what was obviously a picture of the soldiers of the Army of the North.) Their faces were covered with dust that was damp from sweat. There were great dark circles around their eyes. Their unshaven chins sagged with weariness. They marched along, not in step, but with a lieutenant or captain in command. Two platoons I saw were led by sergeants. Later in the evening soldiers were coming in from the northwest, hundreds of them in trucks and some in fast-moving armored cars.”
ITALY TAKES THE WAR TO AFRICA. Finally, two days after Italy’s declaration of war, Mussolini’s legions have started firing shots. A United Press dispatch from Wednesday says that Fascist troops in Italian East Africa have begun a drive to seize France’s East African port of Djibouti, and are said to have broken the initial French defenses. Italy’s air force has launched eight raids against Britain’s naval base in Malta as well. But the Italians have taken some punishment, too -- the Associated Press says that British warplanes have bombed aerodromes in Italian Libya and Eritrea, and have also done damage in raids on Italy herself, at Genoa and Turin.
HAS MUSSOLINI DUG HIS GRAVE? At his University of Virginia speech Monday, President Roosevelt made clear the feelings of decent people about Italy’s entry into the war (“The hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of his neighbor.”). Barnet Nover, too, doesn’t mince words in his Wednesday Washington Post column --
“Our grisly era offers no more nauseating spectacle than in provided by Italy’s entry into the war. With that cold-blooded act, taken at the precise moment when the Allies find themselves at the lowest ebb in their fortunes and fighting with their backs to the wall, a nation which, in happier days, had made many great and lasting contributions to civilization reached the bottom level of degradation. And the Italian tragedy is all the grimmer because the move was only made possible because a people famed for its earthy common sense and rampant individualism had been reduced to the status of lickspittles and automatons.... Mussolini’s act of low cunning will plague his people as long as decency and honor and sportsmanship continue to have any meaning. It may produce temporary successes for it was timed right. But even as to that one should not be too sure....The pit Mussolini has dug with such cynical shamelessness for France and Great Britain may be his grave.”
HITLER’S TERROR TACTICS. A page of photos in this week’s issue of Time magazine doesn’t mince words, either, about exactly what monstrous things the Germans are doing to civilians in the current blitzkrieg. The writing accompanying the photos makes it clear that German assaults in civilians in the Low Countries and in France aren’t unfortunate side effects of war. They’re Nazi policy --
“‘War is the continuation of politics by other means,’ said the great Prussian strategist Clausewitz. It took a great German politician, Adolf Hitler, to grasp the full meaning of Clausewitz’ doctrine. The killing of civilian refugees in order to clog the enemy’s roads is a military conception. The indiscriminate -- and enormously expensive -- bombing of isolated civilian communities and utterly non-military objectives, such as the Germans last week visited upon Belgium and France...is a ghastly but logical extension of Jew-beating, priest-jailing Hitler’s terror politics. His blasting of remote refugees and scattering of suicidal parachutists in his foes’ rear is for the psychological purpose of spreading the impression that nobody is safe anywhere. By it he hopes to cause demoralization, spread defeatism.”
The photos show things like the bloodied body of a young Belgian girl, and the shattered remains of a French hospital. Yes, it’s intended to be propaganda in support of all-out U.S. aid to the Allies, and isolationists will cluck their tongues disapprovingly at it. But propaganda can be enlisted in the aid of a good cause. This cause passes the test.
SENDING A GRAPHIC MESSAGE. Also from this week’s issue of Time -- “In Washington, Ga. (pop. 3,158) readers turned to the seven-column editorial page of their News-Reporter, found the first four and the last two columns in type as usual, one blank column headed: ‘We will tolerate no fifth column here.’”
Is there any hope left of saving Paris from occupation? An Associated Press report Wednesday says the British still think so, and are sending “every gun that can shoot” and every available man to the French front. Harold Denny writes in Wednesday’s New York Times that the British were still hoping yesterday for a new “miracle of the Marne,” on par with the gallant French stand twenty-six years on the Marne River which saved Paris in the nick of time, after the Kaiser’s troops had closed to within twenty miles. A gallant Allied defense along the Marne saved the capital from the German offensive of 1918 as well. Mindful of this, Wednesday’s Washington Post headlines the fighting as the “Third Battle of the Marne” -- expressing an editorial hope, it seems, that the same thing might happen again.
GERMANS ADVANCE ON A WIDE FRONT. Alas, this morning’s radio reports make it clear that France’s defenses south of the Marne aren’t holding. Nor are they holding in other places, for that matter. Last night’s war communique from the French high command (now headquartered south of Paris in the Loire Valley) says Nazi tanks have stormed across the Marne just east of the capital and south of Chateau-Thierry. Twenty miles northwest of Paris, the invaders have reached Beaumont, passing the line of their 1914 advance. Farther east, the Germans have taken Rheims, the famed cathedral city smashed in the World War which had been re-built with American funds. This Nazi force is pushing southwestward toward Verdun, threatening to outflank the Maginot Line. In the west, the French are fighting desperately to contain a forty-mile-wide German break-through to the Seine which threatens Paris with encirclement.
PARIS PREPARES FOR A SIEGE. Alex Small writes from Paris for the Chicago Tribune that the poilus are preparing to bitterly contest the capital --
“While contesting every inch of ground in the fierce encounter going on in the lower stretches of the Seine river and the middle distances of the Marne river, Gen. Maxime Weygand’s men are forging an iron ring around Paris. It faces not only to the north but for miles and miles to the south, and it appears the world will see a spectacular siege. The French do not intend to give up even if the two German thrusts down to the east and west of Paris penetrate deeper and deeper in an encircling movement. Every road leading into Paris, from all points of the compass, is being blocked, entrenched, and barricaded for a heroic defense that may make the struggle which the Basques put up two years ago at Bilbao, Spain, look like a minor episode. Along the highways junk and machinery have been parked across roadways in echelons, and machine gun nests and trenches have been constructed in woods and other places.”
One feels horrified for the prospect of Paris' great monuments -- the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, Notre Dame, so many others -- being threatened with complete destruction. And the Nazis have warned that if Frenchmen defend Paris they “will bear full responsibility” for whatever happens. Yet you have to admire the courage of the French in preparing for this desperate battle.
FRENCH TROOPS ARRIVE TO DEFEND PARIS. Walter Kerr offers a haunting (and partially censored) word-picture from Paris in Wednesday’s New York Herald Tribune of the terrible exodus of French civilians, and the arrival of exhausted troops to take up the city’s defense --
“All night and all day men, women, and children piled out of town by train, bus, truck, automobile, bicycle, baby carriage, and on foot. They took with them what they could -- everything from a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine for the evening meal to mattresses, chairs, clothing, bird cages, dogs and cats. And almost as the last of them were leaving (here 95 words were censored, and the dispatch continued with what was obviously a picture of the soldiers of the Army of the North.) Their faces were covered with dust that was damp from sweat. There were great dark circles around their eyes. Their unshaven chins sagged with weariness. They marched along, not in step, but with a lieutenant or captain in command. Two platoons I saw were led by sergeants. Later in the evening soldiers were coming in from the northwest, hundreds of them in trucks and some in fast-moving armored cars.”
ITALY TAKES THE WAR TO AFRICA. Finally, two days after Italy’s declaration of war, Mussolini’s legions have started firing shots. A United Press dispatch from Wednesday says that Fascist troops in Italian East Africa have begun a drive to seize France’s East African port of Djibouti, and are said to have broken the initial French defenses. Italy’s air force has launched eight raids against Britain’s naval base in Malta as well. But the Italians have taken some punishment, too -- the Associated Press says that British warplanes have bombed aerodromes in Italian Libya and Eritrea, and have also done damage in raids on Italy herself, at Genoa and Turin.
HAS MUSSOLINI DUG HIS GRAVE? At his University of Virginia speech Monday, President Roosevelt made clear the feelings of decent people about Italy’s entry into the war (“The hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of his neighbor.”). Barnet Nover, too, doesn’t mince words in his Wednesday Washington Post column --
“Our grisly era offers no more nauseating spectacle than in provided by Italy’s entry into the war. With that cold-blooded act, taken at the precise moment when the Allies find themselves at the lowest ebb in their fortunes and fighting with their backs to the wall, a nation which, in happier days, had made many great and lasting contributions to civilization reached the bottom level of degradation. And the Italian tragedy is all the grimmer because the move was only made possible because a people famed for its earthy common sense and rampant individualism had been reduced to the status of lickspittles and automatons.... Mussolini’s act of low cunning will plague his people as long as decency and honor and sportsmanship continue to have any meaning. It may produce temporary successes for it was timed right. But even as to that one should not be too sure....The pit Mussolini has dug with such cynical shamelessness for France and Great Britain may be his grave.”
HITLER’S TERROR TACTICS. A page of photos in this week’s issue of Time magazine doesn’t mince words, either, about exactly what monstrous things the Germans are doing to civilians in the current blitzkrieg. The writing accompanying the photos makes it clear that German assaults in civilians in the Low Countries and in France aren’t unfortunate side effects of war. They’re Nazi policy --
“‘War is the continuation of politics by other means,’ said the great Prussian strategist Clausewitz. It took a great German politician, Adolf Hitler, to grasp the full meaning of Clausewitz’ doctrine. The killing of civilian refugees in order to clog the enemy’s roads is a military conception. The indiscriminate -- and enormously expensive -- bombing of isolated civilian communities and utterly non-military objectives, such as the Germans last week visited upon Belgium and France...is a ghastly but logical extension of Jew-beating, priest-jailing Hitler’s terror politics. His blasting of remote refugees and scattering of suicidal parachutists in his foes’ rear is for the psychological purpose of spreading the impression that nobody is safe anywhere. By it he hopes to cause demoralization, spread defeatism.”
The photos show things like the bloodied body of a young Belgian girl, and the shattered remains of a French hospital. Yes, it’s intended to be propaganda in support of all-out U.S. aid to the Allies, and isolationists will cluck their tongues disapprovingly at it. But propaganda can be enlisted in the aid of a good cause. This cause passes the test.
SENDING A GRAPHIC MESSAGE. Also from this week’s issue of Time -- “In Washington, Ga. (pop. 3,158) readers turned to the seven-column editorial page of their News-Reporter, found the first four and the last two columns in type as usual, one blank column headed: ‘We will tolerate no fifth column here.’”
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