European Front

ON THE WORLD TODAY

WHILE the Western Allies swing their vast land, sea, and air power into position for the grand assault upon the Nazis, Adolf Hitler seeks desperately to reassure a badly shaken Germany that the “Atlantic Wall,” at least, is impregnable. But like the pledges given by Marshal Hermann Göring in 1940, that no German city would be bombed in this war, Hitler’s claims for the Atlantic Wall would seem to be just one more abortive prophecy.

Today German leaders are making elaborate comparisons between the defense structures reared along the Atlantic coasts and the Maginot Line in France — and a complete reversal of Germany’s military attitude is evident in that propaganda.

Until last November the Germans called this coastal system the “West Wall.” Now this title is being applied once more to the original pre-war fortifications along the Rhine. Thus, even while the Nazis wax lyrical about the might of their defenses along the Atlantic shore, they apparently envisage eventual retreat to the old western frontiers of the Reich.

Yet warnings from London and Washington about the strength of Germany’s Atlantic Wall and the probable costs of breaching it have substance. These fortifications extend from Narvik to the vicinity of Bordeaux. They have been under construction ever since the loss of the Battle of England, in late 1940, raised the possibility of an eventual counter-invasion from Britain. The “East Wall” in Russia began to take formidable shape only a year ago.

Fortifications on the French Mediterranean shore and along the Italian peninsula did not get really under way until after the North African invasion, in late 1942. The Nazis have had approximately three and one-half years at their disposal for development of defenses along the Atlantic coasts of Europe, with a prodigal supply of forced labor to supplement the work of their famous Todt Organization, under direction of highly competent military engineers.

What is the Atlantic Wall?

Properly speaking, the Atlantic Wall is not a wall at all, but a system of defenses, varying in depth from one occupied country to another, adapted to the requirements of topography and to strategic imperatives.

Central and Northern Norway, though inviting as invasion points, are considered less dangerous by the Germans than Southern Norway and Denmark. Accordingly, the Atlantic Wall north of Bergen consists mostly of heavy concentrations of coastal artillery supported by tank traps, pillboxes, and fortified strong points, stretching back toward the Swedish border and commanding the main highways and rail lines.

More intensive preparations are reported by the Norse underground in the area of Southern Norway, which flanks the gates of the Baltic. Oslo is now a mighty fortress. It is worthy of note that Marshal Erwin Rommel, on his recent inspection tour of the Atlantic Wall, did not go north of this district.

The German High Command regard Denmark as one of “the three probable objectives” of any full-scale invasion drive from Britain. They have assembled no fewer than fifteen divisions in the little peninsula country which controls the water gateway to Germany’s unprotected Baltic shores and offers a valuable base for direct overland invasion of Germany by way of the estuaries of the Elbe and the Weser. Attack on Denmark in Jutland, moreover, would threaten to isolate the Norwegian garrison.

Danish barricade

Germany’s defense system along the coasts of Jutland is highly ingenious. Cities and towns situated on the littoral are all fortified. Tank traps command all roads leading from seaports and harbors and strategic waterfront shorelines. These are reinforced by heavy entrenchments, barbed-wire entanglements, and hidden batteries. Esbjerg, the center of the Jutland defense system, is a congeries of blockhouses, gun emplacements, barricades, and subsurface machine-gun nests. In Silkeborg, a fortress similarly enmeshed, every school, hospital, and hotel has been taken over and fortified as a garrison base.

With the unwilling assistance of 38,000 conscripted Danes, the Todt Organization has evacuated whole districts, devastated the buildings, and converted the wreckage into material for the construction of defenses. Clearing away all trees, shrubs, and natural growths which held the dunes from shifting, Nazi engineers have dug subterranean defense labyrinths connected by cement passages entirely below the earth’s surface. The works are studded with defense weapons. Sands shifted by the sea winds afford remarkable concealment.

All strategic areas in Copenhagen are mined. Every defense center in Denmark is well stocked with supplies for its defenders. Invasion hostage lists are drawn up here, as in Norway and the Netherlands — lists of Danes who are to be executed in batches in reprisal for every act of assistance given the expected Allied invaders by the glowering Danes.

General von Henneken, German commander in Denmark, has his headquarters astride the rail line at Holsted. This places him in control of the approaches to Schleswig —a logical route for invaders bound for the Reich. Every administrative department of the Danish government is obliged to keep a representative at Henneken’s headquarters. Emergency police preparations are set up separately under direction of the Gestapo.

The invasion coasts

The Dutch coast, presents a repetition of the Danish pattern. Here the Germans have subterranean shore defenses so close to the sea that at high tide they are almost wholly submerged. Huge tank traps cut athwart many Dutch cities. One, at the Hague, nearly a third of a mile long, parallels the shore approaches where barbed wire entanglements, “ bumblebee guns” (firing a highly explosive aerial torpedo), rocket guns, and artillery are supplemented by assorted pillboxes, forts, fortified buildings, and trenches.

Reports from the Dutch underground warn of the possibility that some of the German installations appear destined for use of gas. If so, the air superiority of the Allies will provide an answer.

The Netherlands, Belgium, and the northern coasts of France, in addition to the actual shore fortifications, have an elaborately developed system of defense in depth. This consists of “hedgehog” positions, adapted from the Russian front and extending at intervals as far back as the great lower loop of the Rhine and the heights of the Meuse. Evidently the German strategy is to hold mobile forces in the rear among these inner lines and fling them as reinforcements at any coastal area where fixed defense forces need help.

The German behind the gun

Despite its apparent power, Germany’s difficulties in holding her Atlantic Wall will be many. Air-borne assault troops may invalidate much planning. The German High Command in the West possesses no reserves of importance. It can summon no naval strength adequate to challenge the combined might of the British and American navies in the Channel, the North Sea, or the Bay of Biscay, now that loss of the Scharnhorst removes the last of German capital ships in usable condition. The staggering subtractions made by the British this past year from Axis merchant shipping — nearly 1,750,000 tons — cripple Germany’s coastal supply system.

In the air, the RAF and the American Eighth Air Force already dominate the skies. No German Luftwaffe reserve can hope to contest their supremacy for long. Finally, the Wehrmacht in the West of Europe is not only badly outnumbered: its morale is bad. The bulk of these German troops have not been in action for more than eighteen months.

Notwithstanding ruthless deportations of able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five to Germany, thousands of Dutch, Belgian, Danish, and French men, women, and boys are members of guerrilla forces throughout Western Europe. Sabotage since the Teheran and Cairo conferences is reaching unheard-of proportions. The German command is compelled to immobilize literally thousands of troops to guard its communications, its supply dumps, and its equipment against swift depredations of an elusive, apparently omniscient enemy on the spot.

How numerous that foe is can be divined from the fact that in Belgium alone 190 underground papers defy the German police as invasion approaches. Several of these have circulations exceeding 35,000 each. In France nearly a quarter of a million clandestine issues circulate every week among the population. Here is an invaluable auxiliary which the invading Allies should find useful.

Hitler’s New Year

Germany’s mood as the most ominous year of the war opens for her in Europe is better reflected in Hitler’s unguarded New Year’s proclamation, in the dark forebodings of the German domestic press, and in the hysterical campaign of Herr Goebbels against “pessimism,” than in boasts about the invincibility of the Atlantic Wall.

Hitler’s determination to drag all Europe down into ruin with him in the event of defeat, his remark that this war will leave no victors and no vanquished, but only survivors and annihilated, is a repetition of the pledge given in Mein Kampf. It is being demonstrated in Italy and in the Balkans.

Hitler’s frank admissions about the disastrous impact of the air war on German production centers fits into the present doomsday mood of the Reich. Nine of Germany’s largest cities now consume more than they produce — which cancels them out as war production centers. Five others have been damaged almost as severely. Forty others have felt the flail of the Allied aerial bombardment.

The iron rain on Berlin is playing more havoc with Germany in her efforts to bring Russia to a halt in the East than is generally appreciated. Berlin is not only the largest city on the Continent: it is the key rail center for the whole of Central Europe. Its ruin involves the communications and supply system of the Wehrmacht in the East in an inextricable tangle.

Hitler’s “running dogs”

Within the past month the Nazis have made some progress in mending fences among satellite states. But Finland, terrified by the onward sweep of the Russian forces, is wavering again. So is Hungary. The bogey of bolshevism is less effective in Bulgaria, where signs point to a revolutionary explosion, backed by pro-Russian elements. Meantime, with a bewildering complexity of offensives, the Soviet armies slash Germany’s lateral communications, driving toward the Baltic, Central Poland, but above all, Rumania and the Balkans.

Russia’s gigantic offensive at the north and center of the eastern front is secondary to her smashing progress toward the Balkans through the Dnieper bulge in the South. Von Mannstein is bound to make a desperate attempt to halt the northern lunge along the Bug River line in Central Poland. But can he manage it? This line is the last genuinely powerful defense position left the Nazis east of Warsaw.

The huge German army in the South now faces a battle of annihilation. Its line of withdrawal into the Balkans is inadequate, and the task of herding so enormous a force to safety into the Carpathians and Rumania may prove beyond the capacity even of German generalship.

France and the underground

The German military are convinced that danger is increasing along the Mediterranean shores of France and in the vicinity of Bordeaux where the Allies might enjoy a secure southern flank in neutral Spain, where they would receive substantial support from guerrilla bands roving the forests and foothills of the French Pyrenees, and where the broad valley of the Garonne opens directly inland from the sea. If the invading forces hit both the Mediterranean shore and the coast near Bordeaux, they might nip off the whole southwestern corner of France.

These possibilities explain Hitler’s new French policy. Marshal Pétain, after a brief, futile flurry of rehabilitation, is again under suppression. The notorious Otto Abetz is back in France after nearly two years’ absence, with orders elevating Pierre Laval to greater power than the butcher’s apprentice from Auvergne has ever before enjoyed. A campaign to exterminate the French underground and guerrilla forces is the immediate result.

The French underground persists. In spite of heavy raids, during which more than 4000 suspected members were arrested in one month by the Gestapo and the Mobile Guard, the three leading resistance groups in Northern France have convened in a secret congress with their eight corresponding groups in the zone once ruled by Vichy. At this gathering, for the first time, the independent Communist resistance group agreed to join a common front. A structure with centralized leadership is the result.

Here, once more, directors of American and British policy face trouble unless there is drastic revision of their attitude toward the French. Moreover, the example of the French in setting up a Committee of National Liberation is being followed elsewhere in Europe. Marshal Tito Broz’s Partisans have now instituted a Provisional Government. A Committee is emerging in Bulgaria. A third is in full swing in Northern Italy. This last, like its French model, has been joined by the independent Communists.

WHAT TO WATCH

1. Russia’s progress in liquidating the Nazis in the south.

2. Bulgaria — where insurrectionary moves threaten to crumble Germany’s whole Balkan bastion.

3. The “softening up” of the coastal defenses of Western Europe and the progress of the Allied effort to lure out and smash the Nazi fighter force.