European Front

ON THE WORLD TODAY

ALTHOUGH the Rhine has been a water barrier during twenty centuries of history, it presents no big obstacle to amphibious war machines protected by artificial fog, and none at all to air-borne forces, Russia has already proved this fact on the Don, the Dnieper, and the Vistula.

The 340-mile Siegfried system is irregular in depth, with alternating lines of defended emplacements and foxhole-studded open spaces. Along the central and southern parts its major concrete defenses end at the Rhine. Allied firepower and the mass and speed of our assault blot out fixed defenses, as giant bulldozers crack pillboxes like eggshells and plow over the foxholes, turning them into graves.

In this final phase of the war, the German High Command is preoccupied with threats of a war of maneuver on three fronts. The threats are developing formidably and simultaneously. With desperate shortages of properly trained troops, no reserves, and a cumulative deterioration on the home front, Germany’s plight is hopeless — as her own home-front propaganda publicly admits.

Offensives in a war of maneuver periodically slow down as it becomes necessary to accumulate supplies and to repair communications for the next blow. This has been illustrated again and again in the swifter phases of the present European struggle. German invasions across Russia halted every three or four weeks. Russia’s great offensives, as she has driven the Germans westward, have followed a similar pattern.

The Allies along the Siegfried Line have now mustered matériel for the Battle of the Rhineland. With six armies in action and two in reserve, the Allied commanders in the West make it plain that they do not accept positional warfare. The initiative is still theirs and is beyond recapture by the battered enemy.

The fronts cave in

An identical picture presents itself in the East. The Russians stopped along the Vistula. Fighting continued with the utmost ferocity; but it was fighting mainly induced by vain German efforts to unbalance the terrific offensives preparing against them. Approximately 1,000,000 Russian troops, in four armies, were meantime erasing the dangerous German salient in the Baltic States — an essential precaution before the attack on Central Poland and East Prussia in full force.

Germany, whose first-line troops have shrunk this past summer by more than 2,000,000, strives with approximately 1,500,000 to breast two vast offensives, powered by nearly 7,000,000 troops, that surge in on her from the west and the east. Nor is this all. W hile the Polish front caves in on the east, and the defenses of the Rhine crack in the west, another combination of Allied forces, almost 1,000,000 strong, tears at the German defenses on the south. Germany has already lost her forlorn gamble on a protracted positional war in Europe.

Slovakia comes to life

The huge Russian pincers clamping down on Slovakia from the lower Vistula in Poland and up into Hungary from Rumania and Yugoslavia may pull out the entire southeastern corner of Hitler’s fortress. Loss of Slovakia entails consequences for the Germans out of all proportion to its size.

A rising of the Slovak patriots occurred early in September. It was guided by Czech Army officers and technicians parachuted into the country from Russia. The Slovak forces dispatched by Dr. Tiso, Hitler’s puppet ruler, to put down the revolt went over to the patriots, taking along an abundant supply of modern weapons and equipment.

This revolt has thrown open all the key passes of the Carpathians to the Russian-Czech armies on the north. It breaches defenses of the Moravian valley and the Hungarian plain to the south. Germany’s last remote industrial war plants in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Austria lie directly in the path of the invading Allies from the east and southeast.

A panicky exodus of German settlers from the whole region clogs the roads of Southern Germany — adding to the food and housing problems the Nazis face already. Hungary is trapped. Austria begins to realize that the war is coming home.

These operations also endanger the stubborn Kesselring in Italy. Of his two possible lines of retreat, one lies along the Villach route to Austria from the upper Adriatic. That “road back” now faces two serious threats — from the advancing coalition of Russian, Rumanian, and Yugoslav troops in the East and Central Balkans; and from the Allied invasion forces thrown from Italy against the Dalmatian coast.

Liberation of Greece follows naturally as a result of this Allied Balkan offensive and the recent landings farther south. The frantic effort of the Germans to extricate their Balkan armies and take them home to defend the Bavarian border provides British and Greek naval, air, and land forces with a wide-open opportunity which they are not neglecting.

German food and morale

It is now clear that the speed of the Allied sweep across France and the Low Countries caught the Nazi food commissariat off base. Huge collection depots, filled with food assembled for shipment to the Reich, were lost.

Similar disruption of supply plans in Rumania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, together with a poor potato crop, bring large sections of the German people face to face with hunger for the first time in this war. The food ration has again been cut down. Allied prisoners repatriated from the Reich report a significant decline in both the quality and quantity of food served in German prison camps. Even American and British officers are now on a two-meals-a-day basis, with thin soup as a foundation.

Provision for bombed-out refugees has been abandoned. The Nazi policy of compelling German populations to evacuate threatened border regions, east and west, and the thousands of fugitives from the Balkan areas, complicate the whole wobbling German food economy.

The social and economic picture is equally bad. Goebbels’s effort to achieve a “levy in mass” is disrupting civil administration,retail distribution services, education, industry — even his own propaganda system. Mobilization of boys of twelve and fourteen from the younger ranks of the Hitler Youth for front duty as fortification workers provides another clue to Germany’s manpower shortage.

The return of beaten and bedraggled remnants of German armies smashed in the East and in France discloses evidence of a rising hatred among the soldiers against the Gestapo and the Party fanatics. Das Schwarze Korps, the Elite Guard organ, is an excellent barometer of this. Its frenzied denunciations of returned soldiers who talk about peace, and of carping civilians, are now a regular feature. Troops who discuss defeat, it warns, are guilty of treason and will be shot at home as ruthlessly as deserters at the front. Fragments of lost battalions which manage to escape are immediately segregated from all touch with civilians.

The 12,000,000 slave laborers in Germany are Himmler’s greatest headache. Evidence of collaboration between them and opportunistic German factions is widespread. This has caused the Gestapo director to order a “classification” of all forced laborers on the basis of their political attitude. Those adjudged “dangerous” are being murdered in batches. The “suspect” are being segregated anew. Evolution of Nazi policy toward these involuntary “guests of the Reich” suggests that Hitler and his clique are still determined to use them, together with other prisoners kidnaped from occupied countries, as hostages in the final showdown with the Allies.

No other explanation is possible of recent seizure of a thousand of the most prominent persons in Norway and their transportation to the Reich. These Norse victims of Gestapo kidnaping include teachers, civil officials, business leaders, clergymen, and lawyers. They are accused of no crime, but are simply hostages.

The Western bloc

The London Times, which frequently forecasts policy in England, chose September 8, when the Dutch were preparing to return home from exile, as the occasion to review Jan Smuts’s ideas and revitalize them. Collaboration with the Netherlands, it pointed out in a significant editorial, “must indeed extend far beyond the military sphere. In the economic field in particular there are abundant opportunities for fruitful intercourse and common organization among the nations of Western Europe. The success with which such a common organization is established and made effective may largely determine the place which a region, for centuries the leading center of civilization, will occupy in an age when preponderant power is more and more passing to other continents.”

This demand for the organization of a power bloc headed by Britain, and including France, Belgium, and Holland, is given official blessing by Foreign Secretary Eden. Each of the Continental members of the proposed quadrumvirate heads, like Britain, a widely distributed empire. The four, following common policies, would constitute a world group immensely more powerful than England could hope to represent by herself alone. It would tie together interests in Western Europe, the Mediterranean, Africa, the Near East, the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.

Smuts frankly explained that the idea was to set up a counterpoise to the enormous expansion of power represented by Russia — an expansion which, in view of the economic and financial strains of the war upon Great Britain, completely destroys the structure of world power of pre-war days.

The idea is to confront Russian power in Europe, the Near East, and Asia with an aggregation of power roughly similar. Behind this lies an assumption that collaboration with Russia can best be undertaken on terms of manifest equality as to armed strength, economic might, and strategic position.

Russia remaps her neighbors

Russia does not conceal her determination to safeguard herself from future assault from the west. She, like Britain, remembers recent history and sets store by hard-boiled precautions as much as by a world peace organism. Her experience of the League of Nations and Western diplomacy between 1929 and 1939 makes it difficult for her to entertain any other notion.

So, while the British policy is still in the making, the Russian plan is well advanced: —

1. The armistice granted Finland yields Petsamo to the U.S.S.R. This, the only useful port at Russia’s Arctic approaches west of Murmansk, will make invasion by that route unlikely. Acquisition of the peninsula adjacent to Helsinki on the northern side of the Gulf of Finland means a Russian naval base there. This, with control of the lower shore, Riga, and Königsberg, makes Russia mistress of the Eastern Baltic.

2. Russia’s Polish policy is already defined. She intends to fix her frontier approximately at the Curzon Line and insists that the new Poland, while retaining its independence, must be friendly to her. Despite the deplorable and tragic confusion of Polish-Russian relations, no prospect exists that these Russian aims can or will be blocked. Indeed, Prime Minister Churchill subscribes to them already.

3. Below Poland lies Czechoslovakia. With that progressive state the U.S.S.R. has devised a tight alliance. The Czechs, after their bitter experience of Lord Runciman, Neville Chamberlain, Daladier, Munich, and the League of Nations in 1938-1939, have turned eastward for security.

This tendency does not prevent the wise Czech statesman, Dr. Benes, from striving to establish Czechoslovakia as a bridge of understanding between the East and the West. In line with that idea, his government has now renewed its close pre-war alliance with de Gaulle’s France. So, while American and British policies boggle at full support for the French Republic, Russia recements her ties all the way to the English Channel, by way of the Czechs.

4. Russian victories have pulled Rumania into the Russian orbit, and Russian diplomacy has kept pace there too. The only large oil-producing area in all Western Europe now lies within the Russian sphere of influence. Similarly astute Russian policy brings Bulgaria back to her Russian ties and fortifies RussoYugoslav relations.

5. Add to this picture the clear policy of friendship Russia is maintaining toward Italy — whose government she was first among the great Allies to recognize — and it is clear that Russia is consolidating her influence through to the Adriatic.

6. Turkey alone remains a riddle — as usual. Though she has an alliance with Britain, she has evaded her obligations in this war. The critical issue is the Dardanelles. Does Moscow believe it preferable to leave Turkey in control there, or will there be a change? Turkish control might, from Moscow’s point of view, be preferable to control by an Allied commission.

But suppose that Russia presses for readjustment in that quarter favorable to Bulgaria? What then? In long-term policy, Turkey is more likely to lean toward her pre-war Russian ally than toward a more distant Britain. Does this explain Mr. Churchill’s asperity toward Turkey?

While Russia puts her frontier situation in order to suit herself, and Great Britain indicates a disposition to counter by shaping a four-empire military and economic combine, where does the United States come in? Also, what happens to the sovereign rights of all the other nations of the world family? What plan will be applied to fill in the political void in Central Europe left by a defeated Germany? Never have statesmen faced graver questions.