European Front

ON THE WORLD TODAY

RUSSIA’S drive against Poland and Bessarabia is . nullifying Germany’s desperate bid for the initiative west of Kiev, where Germany seeks to restore the Dnieper line. The whole Eastern European front is exploding. Russia’s carefully prepared winter campaign, which Moscow expects will smash the Wehrmacht, is being unlimbered over frozen steppes, swamps, and watercourses.

This new offensive derives its momentum from a succession of victories almost uninterrupted since midsummer. Quickened by firm conviction that this will be the final winter push of the war in Eastern Europe, Russia’s hopes are reinforced by knowledge that Britain and America are at last implementing their pledges for the second front, and by decisions taken at the series of recent conferences.

The German High Command is in a dilemma. Its effort to stop the Russians late this autumn was made possible only by stripping garrisons up and down Western Europe. The campaign has cost the Wehrmacht more than its directors bargained for. The eight armored divisions and 150,000 infantry hurled against General Nikolai F. Vatutin’s forces west of Kiev, and General Konstantin Rokossovsky’s lumbering steamroller west of Gomel, have both been badly mauled. Field Marshal von Mannstein’s troops, in the battle of the Dnieper bend, are in worse difficulties.

The Balkans shiver

Russia’s nearer approach to the Balkans worries the Nazis. The oil fields of Rumania, which supply the bulk of German aviation and motorized transport, are within long bombing range from the lower Ukraine already. Every Russian advance increases their jeopardy. As Bessarabia is penetrated, this danger will grow.

Increasing too are threats to the security of the great net of road and rail lines along the banks of the Danube. When ice halts Danube river traffic, Field Marshal von Wiecks, commander of the Nazi forces in the Southeastern Balkans, must depend on these roads for his supply.

The edging of Turkey toward the Allied camp promises to place this entire German-held area at the mercy of Allied shuttle-bombing, based on three points of a triangle — Foggia in Italy, the lower Ukraine or the Crimea, and the Near East. The Bulgars, Rumanians, and Hungarians are alert to this threat. We are hearing of the flight of populations from Sofia, Bucharest, and Budapest. Everyone who can do so in the entire area is fleeing to the Balkan mountains. The wealthy are taking sanctuary in Turkey.

The Balkan plight urges the United Nations to speed assault against this vulnerable side of Hitler’s “fortress.” Every German satellite state in the region is seeking to get out of the war. Execution of thirty-five Bulgarian officers for mutiny, the refusal of the Bulgars to take over the policing of Albania, their flat rejection of Hitler’s latest demands for levies against Russia, the desertion of Czech and Slovak regiments to the Russian guerrillas, the appearance of Rumanian soldiers as volunteers in the army of “Tito,” leader of the Yugoslavian Partisans, the announcement of Hungary that she can lend no further aid to Hitler, and her loud protest that she isn’t a Balkan state, anyway — here are a few noisy evidences of the growing defection from the Axis camp.

The Balkan partners of Germany are as fearful of an approaching Russia as are the German Junkers. The provisions of the Moscow agreements, which stipulate that each enemy country shall be administered by the army of the Ally which enters it first, fill them with terror. The atrocities inflicted by their armies in Russia are coming home to haunt them.

Turkey flirts

Turkey’s hesitancy about entering the war is not occasioned by doubts as to who will win it. She waits until the British in the Eastern Aegean display sufficient aggressive power to assure protection of Turkish cities on the Bosporus and Black Sea coasts from inevitable revenge bombing by the Nazis. The fiasco in the islands of Kos, Leros, and Samos, the mid-autumn lag in the Italian campaign, and the energy displayed by the Germans operating from Crete and Rhodes off Turkey’s shores, seem to her to justify caution. Reconciliation of Russian and Turkish policies, and the stepping-up of Turkish preparations in Thrace after the decisive meeting at Cairo, indicate that action is near.

Should Turkey remain neutral too long, her custody of the Straits would certainly be menaced at the peace table by Russian demands which might find British support. That danger governs her decision.

Allied strategy in the Mediterranean is clarifying. Heavy reinforcements, huge naval concentrations, the presence of the whole Allied directorate of the Mediterranean effort at the Cairo Conferenae late in November, mean nothing less than a showdown involving the Balkans or Southern France or both.

Does all this imply that the grand smash into Europe from Britain is to be reserved as the final act? Certainly signs suggest that this blow will not be delivered until well past midwinter — unless deterioration of Germany’s military and political position accelerates. One reliable gauge on the time factor is, of course, Russia’s offensive. A better one is the progress of the air war against the Reich.

Germany runs for cover

As the year closes, the RAF and the American Eighth Air Force are dropping about 170 tons of bombs on Germany for every ton her flyers are able to dump over Britain, and are shooting down German planes at the rate of 11 to 1. The United States Fighter Command announces that it has doubled its strength in the past eight weeks — which means that protection for our bombers is now enormous, and that preparations for the coming invasion are speeding up.

The results of the air assault are pictured not only in the lurid inferno of Berlin. An even more significant portrayal of their consequences is to be found in accounts of social dislocation on the Continent. Germans rendered destitute by air raids exceed six million as the year ends. Some German press reports (via Switzerland) even place this figure above seven million! A conservative estimate of the dead approaches 500,000.

Refugees are pouring into Leipzig, Halle, Vienna, and Dresden. Other droves speed to Belgium, Norway, and France. More than 100,000 a month are entering the Netherlands. Whole districts in Denmark are being cleared of inhabitants to make room for bombedout supermen and their families.

Requisitions for quarters extend to schools, boardinghouses, hospitals, villas, public halls, and other public buildings. In every occupied country in Western Europe, homes once inhabited by Jewish victims of the Nazis are turned over to involuntary migrants from the Reich. Simultaneously, wholesale raids are conducted by the occupation authorities for furniture. Even sheds, if they are movable, are being seized.

Prelude to defeat

The ordeal by bombing has its repercussions in other directions. Das Schwarze Korps, the organ of the Elite Guard, is denouncing violently all Germans who tell of the raids at home in letters to soldiers at the front. At the battle areas, as well as in the occupied countries, desertions and mutinies are assuming proportions of real importance. Pitched battles have been fought recently between regular German divisions and revolting Czech, Slovak, and German mutineers. One of these involved nearly ten thousand men in a three-day engagement in Haute-Savoie.

Himmler’s counter-terror is outdoing itself against obstructionists at home, against suspected Army officers, and against the patriots of the underground cadres and civilian resistance elements in the occupied countries. At Olmütz in Moravia, on the anniversary of Czechoslovakian independence, 519 Czechs arrested on a variety of charges were machinegunned in one batch. This surpasses the grisly horror of Lidice, where the toll reached 483.

In the Netherlands sixteen Roman Catholic priests and fourteen Protestant ministers paid the death penalty within a fortnight. Confusion in France makes reliable figures regarding the muffled war there difficult to obtain. It is worthy of note, however, that recourse to assassination is more frequent in France than in any neighboring occupied territory.

The Darlan pattern

Imminence of invasion and rapidly ebbing German prestige in Europe are quickening intrigue all over the Continent. Politics and diplomacy race for position. Would-be emulators of “the Darlan technique” are in evidence in every associate member of the Axis. German home-front leaders — unable to stem public certainty of impending defeat, even though executions for “defeatism” and “obstruction and criticism” approach a hundred a day — are bringing into play all their political skill to bolster morale.

Germany’s aim in the political crisis of Europe still centers on salvaging her Army caste and their Junker partners, so as to preserve foundations for a post-war Reich under traditional controls. The Nazi Party is training new fifth-column experts, whose assignment, as described in reports trickling into Switzerland, is to infiltrate religious, political, social, and racial groups in the post-war world, preparing for a future German bid for power.

Renewed solidarity of the Junker-militarist combination in Germany is one of the most significant developments of the past autumn. It implies a collision with the Nazi Party hierarchy. Does the rising star of Hermann Göring mean that this Army-Junker pressure is directed at splitting the Party into moderates and last-ditch fanatics? Such a move would simplify the task of throwing Hilter and his more deeply compromised associates overboard. It might fortify prospects of success for an engineered coup designed to pave the way toward negotiations with the Allies.

Regardless of the rapprochement among Russia, Britain, and the United States, — a solidarity emphatically attested by the recent conferences, — Germany’s directors still believe that fear of communism at London and Washington eventually will play into their hands.

Evidences of Allied concern lest Europe collapse into violent revolution, once the Reich yields, have not escaped Axis attention. Recent modification of strict policies toward Fascist leaders in Britain by the Churchill Government, including the release from prison of John Beckett, an official of the Fascist League, and Oswald Mosley, the chief of the British pre-war Fascist movement, are weighed in Germany with the policy of Britain and America in Italy, in North Africa toward the French Committee of National Liberation, and in Spain.

We hear of mysterious flittings by Count Franz von Papen, inveterate agent of German heavy industry and Junkerdom, from Turkey to Spain, where high officials of the German Dye Trust are encamped. There are also the astonishing theatricals at Vichy, where, as everywhere else in France, Germany calls the tune.

Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain’s sudden emergence as a “convert” to democratic government (for which, during an unusually long life he has seldom concealed his contempt) fits into this pattern. The Germans see possibilities in the example of Marshal Badoglio in Italy. Observe that the main point emphasized in the recent flurry at Vichy was the “legitimacy” of Pétain’s role. Badoglio’s position is similarly supported on loyalty to the Savoy dynasty — that is to say, “legitimacy.”

What might Germany expect to achieve through rehabilitation of Pétain? The scheme might produce a split in the unity of Occupied France against the Reich, or a return of the pre-war appeasement politicians. It might break apart the French Committee of National Liberation, even if it failed of more ambitious objectives. Achievement of even part of this program would have obvious utility as the hour of invasion draws nearer.

How shall Europe be ruled?

The affair of Lebanon and Syria emphasizes the precarious position occupied by the French Empire in a world ruthlessly embattled. It points likewise to disquieting trends in the policies of Britain and the United States. Every small partner of the United Nations group is watching this episode in contemporary power politics with disrelish and disquiet.

That French relations with Britain and the United States are recklessly worsened by this whole business is certain. The object lesson given the less powerful members of the United Nations family is equally clear. Nor are they alone disturbed.

The drift of the Big Three toward arbitrament of the affairs of continental Europe, without adequate participation of smaller nations in decisions affecting them, is eliciting sharp warnings from the conservative London Economist, from diplomats as well versed in the realities of our times as Mr. Sumner Welles, from statesmen as notable as Marshal Jan Smuts.

Toward “an enduring peace”

The future of small nations drew attention from the conferees at Teheran. Both communiques issuing from the conference referred to the matter. “We shall seek,” declared the leaders of Russia, Britain, and the United States, “the coöperation and active participation of all nations, large and small, whose peoples in heart and in mind are dedicated, as are our own peoples, to the elimination of tyranny and slavery, oppression and intolerance. We will welcome them as they may choose to come into a world family of democratic nations.”

Achieving a genuine coöperative effort broad enough to ensure a proper voice for the smaller sovereignties in any reconstruction of the Continent promises to be exceedingly difficult. Exclusively tripartite decrees issued by Britain, Russia, and the United States through their representatives on the Committee established at London will not be enough. Here is a real challenge to statesmanship.