Indestructible Dietl

Above the Arctic Circle, continuous daylight last week illuminated the last efforts of a haggard, heroic band of Austrian ski troops to hold the one bit of dry land which the Allies have wrested from the Nazi war machine. German airmen tried to strengthen their comrades' failing grip, but massed Allied warships, planes, artillery and foot soldiers on all four sides brought about at last the recapture of snow-clad Narvik, all-but-forgotten Norwegian outlet for Sweden's high-grade iron ore.

For seven weeks the Allies had been balked by a tall, lithe athlete of 49, whose starving troops call him "The Bull." Olympic athletes of 1936 remember him, Lieut. General Eduard Dietl, as organizer of the winter sports program at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. His division of mountain troops, which he trained himself and led, as he did all things, with fierce personal daring through the Carpathians in last autumn's Polish campaign, was bottled up when British destroyers and the battleship Warspite blasted into Narvik on April 12. Steely and aquiline, Bull Dietl is said to have gone aloft in a warplane to call his friend Adolf Hitler in person by radio telephone. Hitler commanded his other generals in Norway: relieve Dietl at all costs.

A German relief column proceeding northward overland from Namsos last week was 118 miles southwest of Narvik at Bodo (pop. 6,000), which German air bombs completely incinerated. There a Norse force and a few British survivors still blocked the way. Allied warships said they sank seven German transports trying to bring Bull Dietl reinforcements by sea.

Around Narvik, swift ski patrols dispatched German parachutists almost as fast as they were dropped.

Narvik lies at the western forefoot of a mountainous promontory between two fjords. Last week a French general and General Fleischer of the Norse 6th Division superintended a 24-hour assault, begun at bright midnight. British warships' fire and French artillery covered landings by French Alpine troops across the north fjord to one side of the promontory. Polish troops pushed in from the other side. Bull Dietl and his few hundred remaining men retreated, but Norse troops blocked their escape from the promontory into Sweden.

The ore railroad threads through tunnels out of Narvik toward the nearby Swedish iron mines. Dynamiting some tunnels shut as they went, the Germans used others as fortresses. They blew up switches, heaped the tracks with wrecked rolling stock, made true Berlin's wry announcement that if lost, the Narvik ore port would be useless to the Allies for a long time to come. At Narvik, the British admitted losing their 4,290-ton anti-aircraft cruiser Curlew, specially armed to shoot down just what finally sank her.

Some of his men had surrendered, some had mutinied and crept into Sweden, but Bull Dietl was believed still alive at week's end. He fought on to keep for Germany, besides access to iron ore, an important source of strategic information. From observations made in the Narvik area, Nazi meteorologists make long-range forecasts of western Europe's weather, determined by south-flowing air masses over the Gulf Stream.

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