European Front

ON THE WORLD TODAY

NO NEW mystery weapons can save Germany — nor can the thousands of ill-prepared boys, women, and elderly civilian conscripts rounded up as last-minute substitutes for the battle lines. Shrunk more than two thirds, the once mighty Wehrmacht lacks sufficient troops to man the three great war fronts in the eastern, western, and southern parts of Germany.

Every major source of essential war materials outside the borders of the Reich has been lost. Every industrial auxiliary to the German war machine — in France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Italy, and the Baltic and Balkan states — has been recaptured by the triumphant Allies, or destroyed, or stands isolated beyond Hitler’s reach. Contact with Spain is ended. On September 15 the last Swedish ship serving Germany’s Baltic supply line was tied up in its home port by orders of the Swedish government.

Fortress without roof — or walls?

The Siegfried Line offers no more of an obstacle to air-borne forces than did the Atlantic Wall, where the approaches were infinitely more difficult. Its greatest weaknesses are not in its military works. These, though partly outmoded, are still among the stoutest in Europe. But the lack of sufficient planes opens every mile of this 340-mile defense system to heavy assault from above. Allied air power, freed from the necessity of dispersing operations over a target as wide as Europe, now concentrates over the shrinking target of the Fortress. The scale of attack is 300 per cent more intensive than last spring.

A worse defect results from the disaster that has erased Germany’s five armies in the West this summer. The Siegfried Line lacks sufficient trained personnel to man it properly. The German High Command did not envisage so complete a rout. They expected their forces in France to fight an orderly withdrawal back to this defense system, if that became necessary. Loss of seven eighths of the 700,000 men mustered to defend Western Europe upsets this plan completely.

The record of Germany’s “lines,” “walls,” and “bastions” in this war is one of unvarying failure. To overwhelming mechanized might, manpower, and air supremacy, fixed defense systems offer no answer yet in modern war. Air power, as Alexander de Seversky points out, has forever ended the epoch of fortresses.

The dynamite of revolution

The Europe emerging from the long nightmare of Axis tyranny is crammed with revolutionary dynamite. Parallels between this situation and the state of affairs following the armistice of 1918 are visible; but it would be dangerous to assume that they are exact.

Then, the governments of France and Italy came through intact. The Belgian regime, having survived in the field, was ready to assume its tasks with unquestioned authority. The Netherlands had escaped the war through neutrality. Norway was likewise immune. The political systems of Greece and Serbia, however shaky, benefited by the presence of powerful and triumphant Allied armies in the Balkans. Thanks to this structure of power on the spot, the shock of the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire was absorbed.

Moreover, though revolutionary in tendency, the defeated Germany of that day remained a manageable unit, retained coherence, and swiftly achieved a makeshift regime based upon the surviving strength of the great Social Democratic Party, to which, however reluctantly, the discredited Junkers gave support lest worse befall them. In the East, social revolution overturned the existing order. But the specter of Bolshevism in Russia served to fortify pressure for order elsewhere.

Today the contrast is striking. West of the U.S.S.R. this war leaves Europe almost entirely denuded of unchallenged, established, continuing governments on the Continent. Where they exist, it is by sufferance of circumstances which threaten to prove temporary. How long the Savoy dynasty will survive departure of the Allied armies from Italy is a question. However tender may be the solicitude of British Conservatism for Spanish Fascism, a revived Republican France will feel otherwise.

The Greeks are politically explosive; Yugoslavia strives to advance a revolutionary revision of rule with the full support at last of King Peter and his Cabinet, only to find the Serbian reaction determined on stubborn resistance. Over every state along the northern shore of the Mediterranean fall two shadows. One is thrown by resurgent British imperial policy, the other by bitter class warfare. In Eastern Europe, only Czechoslovakia seems immune from the threat of the class struggle.

Cleansing France

Every experienced foreign correspondent in France posts warnings of the revolutionary trend of French opinion as that battered, impoverished nation struggles slowly to her feet. Under guidance of General de Gaulle and the Provisional Government of the Republic, great efforts are being made to speed creation of a new political structure to anticipate the trouble that lies ahead. A shake-up of the Cabinet brings powerful representatives of the Army of the Interior into office.

The task of cleansing France of traitors, and her local and regional offices of collaborationists, proceeds pellmell. But the tug of war between forces representing the discredited past and those determined to create a new future has begun, as the first signs of political factionalism attest.

The basic program framed at Algiers for the Fourth Republic portends socialization of the heavy industries and a profound revision of the whole structure of French government. Expulsion from office of every official of the Bank of France is the opening gun of this fight. The liaison officer between German heavy industry, French heavy industry, and French finance, the notorious Pierre Flandin, meantime cools his heels in jail awaiting a trial postponed in response to pressure from London and Washington. Given the mood and temper of the French people, here are the makings of an explosion. It will not be long in coming.

Whatever the great powers devise as a peace system for Europe, unless they proceed with clear understanding of the fact that the peoples of the Continent — some 300 million strong outside Germany and European Russia — have taken their destinies into their own hands, that system will face trouble. In 1918, Russia was an outlaw; in 1944 it is a powerful, victorious ally. The lessons in the need for social and political change taught by this war have been conned by millions in the bitterness of defeat, exploitive tyranny, and suffering.

The Dutch tide rises

“We have not heard anyone suggest,” says a conservative Dutch editor, “a shift towards the right or a return to the status quo ante. . . . Who knows whether we, bubbling plans for a post-war Europe, may find upon liberation that the Europeans, their conceptions of life purified by martyrdom, have set up a design for living for us?”

The Dutch provide useful insight into the rising tide of demands for social reconstruction on the Continent. Historically they are among Europe’s most cautious and moderate peoples. With an empire to govern, they have a tradition of conservatism. Of their loyalty to their queen there is no question whatever. Practically every group in the Dutch underground has voluntarily pledged it again and again.

Yet the joint manifesto lately issued by the Dutch underground groups of the extreme right and those of the socialist “center” make it clear that the revolutionary ferments working elsewhere in Europe are present in Holland also. The first evidence of this is the fact that the ultra-conservative Dutch political right finds itself able to unite with the socialists in setting forth a program of reform. That evidence is reinforced by blunt demands.

Accepting as inevitable a transitional period of “state of siege” during which order shall be restored and the government re-established under direction of the throne, the Dutch conservatives and their socialist partners insist that this period be limited to the “time strictly needed for those purposes.” Both frown on lawless reprisals, and both demand that there be no delay in bringing war criminals to trial.

Looking into the future, Dutch conservatives and socialists insist that it is not enough to restore Holland “as it existed before May 10, 1940.” With liberation, they declare, the historic moment will have arrived for radical rejuvenation of the nation’s life.

They demand a parliamentary democratic regime in the fullest sense of those words, and representation of the workers and consumers in industrial management; and they announce that “liberal, capitalistic production methods do not guarantee people social security and should, therefore, be replaced by a system of national and international management, abolishing production for profit.”

The manifesto demands full recognition of minority rights; freedom of the press, religion, and association; state assistance in illness and old age; equal educational chances; equalization of the status of agricultural and industrial workers. It proposes also that the benefits of a thoroughgoing liberal reform be extended to every part of the Dutch Empire.

It is important to keep in mind that this document emanates from the sections of the Dutch public traditionally associated with conservative and moderate reformist politics and social policy. As such it serves warning that the tides sweeping Europe today are neither localized nor subject to special control.

Britain seems more aware of all this than Washington. Geoffrey Crowther, the able editor of the London Economist, emphasizes that fact when he suggests, in the most noted financial organ published in “the City,” that great areas of Britain’s economy must be socialized.

Hunger walks abroad

Hunger is a notorious revolutionary. One powerful instrument in the hands of the Allies which might be employed to guide and help coming social and political changes in Europe is the instrument of relief. Will they succeed in using it wisely and with the necessary speed?

Evidently not, unless there is drastic change in methods which have now been operating for almost a year in Italy, and since shortly after D Day in France.

While the crop situation in much of Europe this fall is good, it must not be forgotten that in many countries, such as Poland, Italy, and the Balkan States, great areas have been desolated, populations have been rendered destitute, and long years of undernourishment have left masses of the people on the verge of starvation.

Thousands of acres of the richest agricultural land in the Netherlands and Northern Belgium have been deliberately ruined by the Germans, who have flooded the sea in over them through broken dikes. The transportation system of Western Europe is largely ruined and denuded of rolling stock. Industries have been wrecked, mines have been blown up, factories have been burned, bombed, and looted of machinery.

Ten and one-half months after the Allied capture of Naples it was possible for Pietro Nenni, Italian Socialist editor, to charge that three fourths of the population of that city live in “beggary, prostitution, and black marketing.” Their lot has improved but little since he wrote.

Though food is being brought into Rome steadily by the occupying authorities, there is not enough to meet requirements. Allotments daily as late as August averaged one third of the number of calories essential for minimum existence needs. Conditions in Northern Italy are terrifyingly worse because of the destruction of industries there and the density of population.

Where is UNRRA?

The Allied armies, moving into France, estimated that military control over immediate relief would continue for six months. Yet in Italy the Army is still running relief programs after a year. Meantime, after eleven months of existence, the laboriously constructed and ably staffed UNRRA, under direction of former Governor Lehmann of New York, was still without a distinct field of service and a time schedule for operations. It has been elbowed aside by the military, under claim of Army priorities, and tangled in restrictive red tape spun by a State Department jealously anxious lest its prerogatives be infringed.

Relief cannot wait. The Army, despite its abundant energies, its desire to be helpful, and the obvious good sense which concedes it control over relief problems so long as any area lies within the field of immediate military operations, cannot possibly conduct a successful war and at the same time run an adequate social relief program for millions of people in a dozen different nations scattered from Denmark to the Balkans.

According to the most careful estimates, nearly a third of the population of continental Europe outside Germany are already close to starvation diet. Approximately 80 million more people will be added when defeated Germany, Austria, and Hungary become a direct responsibility of the victors — as the rules of war accepted by the Allied governments provide.

There is urgent need for speedy redefinition of functions and separation of roles as between the Army and UNRRA. Desirable also would be the assignment of a diplomat of greater maturity of experience and less dubious past association than Mr. Robert Murphy, of North African-Vichy fame, to the post of adviser to General Eisenhower on French and German problems. If the tactics and point of view Mr. Murphy exemplified in North Africa govern his approach to these problems in Europe, our past troubles will be trifling compared with those that lie ahead.