European Front

ON THE WOULD TODAY

THE power of Russian resistance, the growing weight of the assault upon Germany from the air, and the probability of an invasion of the Continent by the spring of 1943, if not before, have forced Adolf Hitler to change his strategy but not his goal.

His revised plan looks to a yielding of the initiative in Europe in 1943 and the transformation of the whole Nazi-dominated Continent, meantime, into a gigantic, impregnable fortress. For the building of this fortress four conditions are indispensable: —

1. Germany must disentangle herself from the Red armies and complete the conquest of key positions in Russia which still elude her grasp.

2. The onslaught by air from the British Isles must be halted or controlled.

3. Hitler’s gamble — that Russia’s war partners will be unready or unwilling to launch a full-scale attack on his position in Europe before next spring

must be insured by propaganda suggesting a stalemate and the wisdom of a negotiated peace.

4. The back doors of the fortress— Libya and French West Africa — must be held ajar for a sortie into the Middle East and a thrust to the West.

Hitler’s storm signals

Weeks before Hitler proclaimed his shift to the defensive, the storm signals in Europe indicated its necessity. The timetable of the Nazi High Command, disrupted at Sevastopol, was again slowed down in Stalingrad, the great key city on the lower Volga. The objective set by the Germans during early summer —destruction of the Russian armies — was modified to the more limited conquest of Southern Russia on the line of the Volga, the Caspian coast, and the oil fields of the lower Caucasus. Now even this program is diminished. Neither a shake-up in the command of the German armies nor the sacrifice of reserves and equipment without stint has sufficed to wrest from the Russians all the positions required for sound tactical stabilization of the front in Eastern Europe.

As winter comes down from the north the military necessities which drive the Wehrmacht to new and frenzied effort are unmistakable. To secure better positions, the High Command must carry on a struggle which is devastating to the German armies and incites the Axis subordinates to open mutiny.

Even if the restricted objectives of this year’s campaign are attained in time, what certainty is there that Marshal Semyon Timoshenko’s tireless troops, concentrated on the flank of the great German salient of the Don, will not strike back when winter adds its power to the Russian blow?

Hitler’s fortress

Hitler’s conception of Europe as a fortress shows how far he has been carried by the events of 1942. For the first time since his war machine rolled into Poland he, in his own words, gives defense precedence over mobility and attack. Yet when one scrutinizes the blueprint of Hitler’s fortress one sees that the “defense” he proposes is built only in part of Maginot masonry. It is also to be a military power plant, generating new and more explosive force against the United Nations.

In keeping with this program, the engineers of the New Order have been directed to speed their task. Organization of the vast resources, material and human, which have fallen under domination of Germany must be hastened. So, in one occupied area after another, skilled workmen, technical specialists, common labor, have been rounded up and deported to the industrial centers. By early October these levies had added nearly 6,000,000 alien workmen to the ranks of German labor. Yet even this staggering conscription is not enough to operate Europe as a fortress.

Hitler’s “allies”

In dealing with countries retaining a semblance of independence. Hitler’s policy demands more subtle pressure than that applied to the conquered peoples. See how Unoccupied France is maneuvered from a system of voluntary migration of workmen to a system requiring the registration of all men and women capable of work, and thence to a final decree of conscription. By withholding raw materials from French factories and by relentless pressure on Vichy the circle is closed. Then, on the argument that idle machines and idle workmen cannot be tolerated in the New Order, both men and machines are carted off to Germany.

Italy is faced with a similar drain on industry. Her capacity for resistance is even less than that of Unoccupied France. Italy’s needs, particularly coal, place her completely at the mercy of Hitler. So, on the same pretext, the equipment and manpower of the great industrial regions of Northern Italy are transferred to Germany while Il Duce protests that the Italian nation must not be reduced to the status of an agricultural department.

Germany’s satellites in the Balkans, the “inferior” peoples, are reduced to their new role as slaves in the master economy of the Third Reich. Time is the whip: Hitler knows that his fortress must be secure and in operation by the spring of 1943. The Führer and his echo, Dr. Goebbels, have both given lip service to “socialism”; but as the program speeds up, the real intent of the Nazis is revealed in the orders issued for reorganization of the Elite Guard: the Nazi Black-Shirt political army. The German people, together with all the other peoples of Europe, are described in the orders as “the proletariat.” The Elite Guard is “The Praetorian Guard,” and is directed to keep “ the proletariat” in order, to put down all dissentients, German or alien. Meanwhile the Party hierarchy, in whose upper ranks the leading figures of German big business are now comfortably ensconced, prepares to reap the rewards of total war in the form of exclusive total privileges, political and economic, seized from a prostrate Europe.

Within the fortress thus conceived, whose inland and coastal boundaries Hitler proposes to build to staggering strength and garrison with two thirds of his army, the Nazi war lord sees himself fully supplied and unconquerable. Opponents within are to be exterminated. Foes without are invited to exhaust themselves against the bastions, until their regimes collapse into revolutions brought on by the economic and political strain. Here is the meaning of Hitler’s boast during the autumn, that “ no bourgeois state will survive this war.”

Stalemate?

Any thought of stalemate envisioned by outsiders is sheer delusion. The German strategy remains offensive despite appearances. From Ankara, where he engineered a deal with the Turks exchanging German guns for Turkish chrome, the slippery von Papen strives to win the Arab world with pledges of a Federated Arab Power as soon as the Nazis have won the war. In Arabia, as in India, the Germans are making maximum use of the failure of the British Empire to fulfill pledges given during the First World War. Their aim is to disintegrate the position of the United Nations throughout the Middle East and to immobilize the huge British army in a deteriorating India.

Surprise sortie

The Middle East is the back door to the fortress. A heavy sortie, whether delivered by way of Turkey and the Aegean or by renewal of the drive into Egypt, might so alarm London as to compel postponement of plans for our direct assault upon Europe.

Marshal Rommel’s Afrika Korps still holds positions within swift striking distance of the main naval base at Alexandria. Streams of troops, hundreds of guns, trainloads of supplies pouring down through the Balkans provide accumulating evidence of Hitler’s determination to press the war on this front. Every increment to Rommel’s forces — even the addition of two or three divisions might be expected to throw new confusion into the overall plans of the United Nations.

As the approaches to the Middle East constitute the back door, so French West Africa is a cellar door through which a surprise sortie might be undertaken against us. A swelling stream of Germans, filtering into French Morocco with the assent of Vichy, and the voluble concern of the German radio and press about Dakar testify that a new battle area outside Europe is preparing in that quarter. The strategic position of Dakar with respect to convoy routes southbound around Africa, bomber ferry routes from the United States to the Middle East via the French Congo, and the potential invasion route by air to Brazil indicate that a few German divisions and an air fleet could inflict vast damage upon the United Nations if they got there first.

Disintegration within

War fatigue is spreading. Staggering casualty lists are generating despair. Ambulance trains roll endlessly into Prague, into Budapest, into Bucharest and other cities. In all of these, medical facilities have proved totally inadequate to handle them. In Vienna twenty-three Catholic churches, all the theaters, several monasteries, and the largest of the public buildings have been confiscated to hospitalize the wounded from Russia. German physicians and surgeons, frantic for lack of supplies, warn against the horrors of epidemics.

In Rumania but five divisions of the army remain. Ten others sent to the Russian front have sustained losses up to 80 per cent of their effectives. Riots greet demands from Berlin for more cannon fodder. A new Gestapo army has been hastily sent to the scene to calm the people by mass executions. Bulgaria’s most formidable political organization, the Macedonian Revolutionary Party, has deserted the Axis to join the rebels in the Balkan mountains. Albania exploded suddenly into guerrilla war and decimated Italian troops, compelling II Duce to dispatch seven divisions to a new battleground. In Hungary, Croatia, and Slovakia firing squads operate at increased tempo. Slovenia, in which the Italians razed eighty-nine villages in an orgy of reprisal murders, has plunged openly into war against all Axis forces and sympathizers.

The import of all this unrest lies less in the threat of successful revolt than in the fact that PanSlavism, the ancient and mortal enemy of the Teutonic power policy in Southern and Southeastern Europe, is emerging once more, compelling diversion of larger and larger contingents of Axis troops. Nor are these fissures within the “ fortress ” limited to the Balkan area. In the North the cracks widen also. Norse resistance brought to ruin the latest and most ambitious endeavor of Vidkun Quisling to build a foundation for his rule. Then his goose-stepping fascist party storm troopers mutinied against orders sending them to the Russian front. Sweden, openly expressing expectation of attack, has increased her arms program again and ordered the most extensive maneuvers ever held opposite the German-dominated shores of the Baltic. Exhausted Finland again mutters a desire for peace. Simultaneously the Nazis’ sharpening war on religion has elicited denunciations from Catholic Cardinals and Protestant Bishops alike.

To permit Hitler’s program for Europe the respite until spring which he needs will spell disaster. Time favors Germany — as Russia has warned, as Wendell Willkie has protested, as distant China has shouted. It will favor the United Nations only when they begin to use it with energy and decision.

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT

Will the Germans move into West Africa, and what will such a move do to relations between the United States and Vichy? Is the political barometer falling in Britain? As winter releases the German Luftwaffe, will there be a new air war over England? Will there be more than window dressing at the New Order Conferences scheduled for Vienna this winter? And how soon will the United Nations arrive at a Unified Command?