European Front

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THE crash of Italian Fascism and its reverberations throughout Europe are forcing momentous changes in Germany’s war status. These shifts all disclose a fact of supreme importance: Germany’s strategic reserve of military manpower (estimated at approximately 750,000 men) is at last being consumed wholesale.

See how the process of deterioration, sped by the Italian debacle and mounting Allied attack, is hastening the Third Reich toward disaster.

Eastern Front. Here after the failure of the Nazi offensive in early July — the first great reverse experienced in a summer campaign by German arms in Russia — the Wehrmacht found itself stripped of nearly half its entire tank strength. One fifth of the dwindling air force with which the Nazis began the summer was also shattered. Against German armies thus weakened, the Russians unleashed their massive counter-offensive, aimed at the anchor of the German front at Orel and their Ukrainian base at Kharkov.

At the height of this ferocious struggle, as the Wehrmacht was being battered from its defenses, Mussolini fell from power in Rome, dragging with him the Fascist Party and dislocating every Italian division posted in Hitler’s Fortress.

Denied supplements for Russia drawn hitherto from her satellites, Germany is forced to rush large contingents of her cherished reserves to the East. To add to her difficulties, she must replenish her crippled air forces in Russia by draining away squadrons needed for the defense of Western Europe.

These two facts explain the sudden weakening of air resistance encountered by the RAF and the American Eighth Air Force, as they develop their long-expected program of successive saturation raids on one industrial city of the Reich after another. Despite the Italian crack-up and regardless of the weakening of her defenses against invasion from England, Germany finds it imperative to halt the Russian advance.

For in Russia the danger of a German collapse is greatest; and in Russia the now desperate Nazis and their cronies, the German militarists, still hope to preserve a political lever with which to pry apart the Allies — if not before military downfall, then after it. The Russian bogy is the ultimate weapon in their shrinking arsenal. Allied fears of European revolution saved German reaction in 1919. Might not the same device serve again?

The Balkans. The change in Nazi outlook forced by Mussolini’s downfall and by the ensuing strife and confusion in Italy is not limited to the eastern front. Between twenty-five and thirty Italian divisions have been garrisoning Greece, holding down Albania, and assisting the Germans in the struggle with guerrillas in Croatia, Slovenia, and Yugoslavia. These Italian forces are now a liability. Some have deserted to the guerrillas. Some have escaped to Italy. The rest are disarmed and under German guard. This means that almost half the total reserves of the Reich are needed to restore shattered Axis defenses in the Balkan area.

Mussolini’s fall shakes the satellites

Other consequences of the Italian collapse affect Germany in the cockpit of Europe: —

Hungary, wrhose premier, von Kallay, sought to resign on the eve of II Duce’s downfall, is growing hostile to the Reich as popular opposition to the government’s war role mounts. The Nazis are compelled to post several divisions, badly needed elsewhere, on the Hungarian frontier, to forestall serious trouble as the Hungarians seek frantically to escape from the Axis camp to the Allied bandwagon.

THE ATLANTIC MONTHILY, SEPTEMBER, 1943, Vol. 172, No. 3. Published monthly. Publication Office, 10 Ferry St., Concord, N. H. Editorial and General Offices. 8 Arlington St., Boston (16), Mass 40c a copy, $5.00 a year; foreign postage $1.00Unsolicited manuscripts should be accomnanied by return postage. Entered as second-class matter July 15, 1918. at the Post Office at consor N.H. Under the Act of March 3,1879. Printed in the U.S.A. Copyright 1943. by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights, including translation into other languages, reserved by the publisher in the United States, Great Britain, Mexico, and all countries participating in the International Copyright Convention and the Pan-American Copyright Convention.

Rumania, after reluctantly pledging a few divisions for Russian service and obtaining equipment for them, has reneged. Devastation of the oil fields at Ploesti is accentuating revolutionary tendencies stimulated by the Italian collapse.

The Bulgars, whose government also overrode public will in that pro-Russian nation in order to collaborate with the Fascists (and pick up territorial spoils at the expense of Greece and Yugoslavia), are unable to provide effective auxiliaries for garrison duty in the stolen regions because of explosive revolutionary developments at home.

Thus, when Germany needs all possible strength to stem a threat from Russia which may force her to retreat to the Dnieper and even drive her back to Poland before spring, she is compelled to expend reserves to protect the Balkan side of her Fortress because defection of her allies is accentuated by events in Italy.

Germany’s Balkan headaches

Meantime, the guerrilla forces in the Balkans are expanding phenomenally. Throughout Fortress Europe they approximated 400,000 six weeks ago. Today they exceed half a million. Nearly 300,000 are actively at war against the Axis in the Balkan states.

In Greece the patriots are fighting from the Peloponnesus to the northern mountains, under command of Colonel Napoleon Zervas. German rail communications from Salonika to Athens are at their mercy. Against road and waterway transit they are invoking dynamite and landslides. Against local quisling officials they have opened a kidnaping campaign.

General Draja Mihailovich and his Chetniks, and the Yugoslavian Partisans who fight under the command of the mysterious “ Tito,” have swelled their ranks to nearly 250,000 since the Axis cracked at Rome. From Montenegro to the Macedonian mountains, these bands are tearing Axis communications apart, challenging General Rommel’s hastily regrouped forces. Within the past twenty weeks they have destroyed four Axis divisions.

Croat, Slovene, and Albanian guerrillas, spurred by the disaster that has overtaken their hated Italian enemy, are ranging the northwestern Balkan areas.

Within five months Russian guerrillas have accounted for 31,000 German soldiers, derailed 238 military supply trains, destroyed 222 locomotives, burned 2800 railway cars, and driven German military traffic to the rivers. They are now blasting steamers, tugs, barges, and cutters.

Germany awaits attack

The drive into Italy may be aimed at the Brenner Pass to the north. That would explain German determination to hold the Lombardy plain and to deny the United Nations use of the most strategic of Italy’s airfields against the Danube, the transplanted German war industries in Austria, and South Germany. But raids on Rumania’s oil fields make it clear that the Allies are by no means dependent upon control of Lombardy for offensive advance. Besides, would not an attempt to crash the Brenner prove costly and slow?

A blow across the foot of the Italian peninsula by air and sea into the Balkans would facilitate junction of the Allies and the Balkan guerrillas. Delivered against Albania and the lower Dalmatian coast, it would flank General Rommel from the west and it could drive the Germans into retreat from the whole southern portion of the Balkan peninsula, liberating most of Greece. Strong Allied forces in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq are certain to move as the Mediterranean campaign builds toward a climax.

Germany anticipates such a strategy. Crete and the Dodecanese Isles newly regarrisoned with Germans under Rommel, will have to be cleared of Nazis before the eastern claw of the expected Allied pincer movement against the Balkans can reach for that superb invasion port of Salonika.

Turkey sitting pretty

Germany will strive desperately to thwart the Allies from Salonika. Possession of the port would fix an Allied pincer on the whole Balkan peninsula, west and east. Allied control of the Northern Aegean might mean entrance of Turkey into the war, the opening of the Dardanelles to Allied naval forces, and new complications for the Germans on the Black Sea coasts of Russia.

Will Turkey risk possible disfavor from Russia by opening the Straits? What of the Montreux Agreement? It is by no means certain that Moscow would welcome Allied naval power in the Black Sea. Russia has repeatedly emphasized that she will take care of the eastern front herself, aided by Allied supplies.

Franco will stay out

Spain is no longer pressed by the question of involvement in the war. Spain’s troubles from now on will be domestic. Already the adversities of the Axis have elicited a timid suggestion from pro-monarchists in the Franco following. This Franco has scotched, expelling the dissidents from his ferociously repressive regime. But the tides are rising. Best evidence of this is the flight to London of the notorious Juan March, who financed Franco’s rebellion against the Spanish Republic. He now declares that “the civil war is not yet ended” in Spain, denounces the rigors of the Franco government, demands release of Spanish political prisoners, and talks about the desirability of a “democratic” leftist rule for the Iberian Peninsula.

The head of the unsavory German Dye Trust has likewise turned up in Spain. Is he bound for the Argentine? Or does he hope to make “arrangements” with someone on behalf of the industrialists in the Third Reich who financed Hitler’s rise to power? The political aspects of the whole war are fast assuming an importance equal to its military aspects. Unless the Allies identify Fascism’s industrial and financial backers with their handiwork, the seed for World War III may survive this Armageddon. All Nazi policy-moves now seek such an escape.

The real neutrals

Two neutral nations face increasing dangers because of the war in Western Europe. Switzerland will be jeopardized if the Germans carry out their apparent decision to defend the Lombardy plain. The Swiss trump against being submerged by tides of German “military necessity” which swallowed many of the small nations in Europe is formidable. The railroads between the Third Reich and Italy pass through the Swiss Alps, and the shrewd Swiss have mined the tunnels against precisely this contingency. Forehanded, they have notified the Nazis that the first platoon of German invaders crossing the frontier will signal collapse of the Alps upon vital German communications.

Sweden does not hold so effective a card against the dangers blowing up around her as Allied invasion from Britain and Iceland threatens Norway. Long promised and long withheld, that blow may be speeded by Germany’s difficulties in Russia, the Balkans, and Italy. These have diminished German defensive power in Norway as well as in the Low Countries and France.

Will the blow fall on Norway first? Or will the Allies drive instead at the more direct route to Berlin over the Dutch or Belgian coasts? The troubled Swedes think the answer is Norway, the conquest of which would carry Allied sea and air power to the gates of the Baltic. The whole northern coast of the Reich would be open to assault at its least protected spots. Was it for this that Hamburg and Kiel were knocked out? Voluntary Nazi retreat from Norway would imply speedy German surrender.

Sweden’s geographical position makes her the logical highway over which the Germans could reinforce their Norwegian garrisons or dispute Allied invasion of the Norse coast. Hence, Swedish unease is easy to understand. Many signs show that the Swedes expect trouble to develop in Norway before autumn, Swedish-Nazi relations are deteriorating.

Sweden learns from Norway

Construction and commissioning of Swedish submarines is being rushed pell-mell. The Swedish air force is being boosted frantically. The army is being held at extraordinary maneuvers all summer and autumn — something that never happened before in this war. A pamphlet has been issued by the Stockholm government entitled “If War Comes,” and public officials from the King and Premier down are trying to induce the public to memorize it.

Some hint as to whom the Swedes expect in the guise of invaders can be drawm from the warning in this booklet that any order directing cessation of resistance will be false. The plans would raise the whole civil population against the invaders. Sweden has noted Secretary Stimson’s visit to the American garrison at Iceland, the swift multiplication of Canadian and American invasion troop arrivals in Britain, the American Fortress raid on Trondheim.

Norway smolders

Invasion jitters grow in Norway itself. Hostage lists are being drawn up. Germany intends to arrest every prominent person in the country the moment invasion begins. Bonfires are forbidden. Submarine nets are being stretched before ports of entry from Oslo around into the North Sea. New special armed guards have been set on all bridges and public buildings.

Gestapo raids on private homes assume proportions of an epidemic, as the search for saboteurs and evaders of the labor draft is redoubled. A vast tank training field has been hacked out of the forests of Central Norway. Huge barriers of ice are to be built on the lakes of Northern Norway to block Allied planes.

A “no man’s land,” nearly five miles wide, is being created along the entire Swedish-Norwegian border, and all civilians are being evacuated from the area. This is partly a move of the Germans to stop wholesale desertions of Nazi troops, who have been fleeing to internment in Sweden. It may also be designed as a holding area against possible attempts by the Swedish Army, in the event of German attack, to hammer their way through to join an Allied invasion from the Norse coasts.

Has the German commander in Norway received news that it may be impossible to aid him swiftly in event of invasion? At any rate he has notified all German civilians in Norway that they are part of the Nazi Army from the moment invasion begins.