The Race for Initiative
A swarm of bees in May Is worth a load of hay. A swarm of bees in June Is worth a silver spoon. A swarm of bees in July Is not worth a fly.
This ditty, roared out by gruff Lord Beaverbrook in Britain's august House of Lords, was a handy text for the war's great new development: a race for the initiative on Germany's western and southern fronts.
Catchpenny Clamor. The urgency was obvious. Therefore it was not surprising that Lord Beaverbrook, inveterate roarer for a second front, should roar again to the peers of the realm: "I believe that the war is not won. Whatever may be the plans of the Germans, we should strike and strike now, before the Germans can regroup their divisions. We should strike before the Germans can recover from the Russian offensive."
The Beaver's agitation--which his friend Winston Churchill terms "a process of emphatic stimulation"--was not as significant as its reception. Lord Trenchard criticized Lord Beaverbrook for arousing the British people, who could not be told the true facts just now. The Earl of Listowel accused the Beaver of doing "a positive disservice to the country" by bringing the matter up at this juncture. Viscount Simon said that the discussion was "absolutely dangerous," called the term second front a "catchpenny phrase," based on ill-informed clamor.
The inference was that the strategy makers were well aware of the urgency, that they were in fact doing all they could about it. The Lords, like everyone else, were admittedly a little bewildered as to just what was going to be done; but they believed that what could be done, would be done.
"The U.S.S.R. Expects." There was a difference between the British second-front clamor of last year and this voice crying in the bewilderedness. The outcry last year was truly popular. It was based on a widespread impression that the U.S. and British leaders had no plan and were doing nothing. It was in response to pleas from a Russia which seemed to be in real danger of collapse. The argument then was actually more moral than military.
Now the shoe was on the other foot. Now there had been a Casablanca. More important, the Red Army* had risen on the count of nine and was mightily belaboring the Germany adversary. That greatest of propagandists, Stalin, had got up from a suppliant position and was now using the second-front issue as something very like a threat. Last week London turned out so enthusiastically to a reception in honor of the Red Army at Ambassador Ivan Maisky's house that one of the guests said: "We could easily open a second front right now if we just turned all these fellows loose." Turning this enthusiasm to good use, Ambassador Maisky spoke as a partner, not a beggar: "It is natural . . . that the U.S.S.R. expects an early realization of the military decisions taken at Casablanca."
What those decisions were, only the campaigns of 1943 can tell. If they are German campaigns, they will not tell. But the urgency on both sides, of the Allies' earnest determination to fulfill Casablanca and the Germans' to frustrate it, there is no doubt. All around the profile of Europe there are signs.
Europe's Stomach Muscles. Churchill's favorite strategy is long standing and well known. Ever since the time of Gallipoli he has favored getting at the beast through his "soft underbelly." Actually that underbelly is not soft now. By last week it had become apparent that victory in Tunisia, which probably must precede any invasion of southern Europe, might be delayed long enough--perhaps into June--to let the underbelly become much harder.
A correspondent of the Hungarian Pester Lloyd on a trip through Thrace reported last week that the frontier area was speckled with innumerable, brand-new bunkers. Minsker Zeitung, a German paper in Occupied Russia, featured stories about mighty new fortifications on the Aegean islands, including Crete. In Yugoslavia, the SS division Prinz Eugen was last week winding up a month's campaign in which it claimed to have recovered half of the Partisan-freed territory, including the capital, Bihac. The south of France was being additionally fortified.
The Risk of Spain. In order to deny the Allies free communications through the Mediterranean, Germany must keep positions in Africa close to opposite positions in Europe. Tunisia and Sicily afford such positions. Gibraltar and Spanish Morocco could also afford them, and Spain itself could close the narrow way from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean.
Last week a sudden spurt of activity in and near Spain focused the world's attention there. Most of the activity was political, but 400 German troop trains were reported to have moved recently toward France's Spanish border. Eleven divisions were said to be massed on the Mediterranean end of the frontier. Germany closed the border area as a military zone.
But these preparations may have been solely defensive. Occupation of Spain by Hitler would entail a heavy risk. The adventure would probably require 25 divisions. The Iberian Peninsula would earn Hitler some 1,800 miles of vulnerable coastline. Since most Spanish railways are broad gauge and already taxed for internal needs, it would give Hitler a logistical headache. But above all, it would disperse his forces to duplicate a job already being done at the Tunisia-Sicily bottleneck.
Audacity or Smoke Screen? A report from Le Havre to the Swiss Tribune de Geneve last week said that German reconnaissance over England had led to this conclusion: "We are on the eve of an English attempt of unsuspected audacity." Considering the source and the channels, this message could mean one of two opposites: 1) the British were preparing an invasion force; 2) they or the Germans were setting up a smoke screen. Either could be true.
Germans fear an Allied blow at Norway. A German military writer, retired Rear Admiral Richard Gadow--the first German to disclose, in 1935, that the Nazis were building submarines--wrote recently in Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung: "A successful Allied invasion of Norway would be a catastrophe for Germany. Norway in the hands of the enemy would mean great economy in the protection of Anglo-Saxon convoys . . . and would constitute a dangerous threat to the Finnish northern flank"--to say nothing, eventually, of the German northern flank.
Germans are certainly prepared for, and have recently begun talking about, an Allied attack on the Lowlands or the French submarine coast from Brest to the south. The Germans themselves might take the great gamble of trying to knock Britain out. Success would not win the war for Germany (there would still be Russia), but the same sort of reasoning which impelled Hitler to turn on his Russian rear in 1941 might impel him to turn on his British rear in 1943.
Britain now is not the Britain which Hitler might have crushed in 1940; its defensive air power, which saved Britain then, is now the strongest concentration of sky-might anywhere. After Dunkirk, Britain literally had no army in 1940; it has forces for land & sea defense in 1943. And Britain keeps great defensive forces at home precisely because attack on Britain, however remote it may seem to others, is always a possibility to Britons.
Need for Speed. Time is short for the Allies. For good weather from Norway's North Cape to Cairo, they must strike Europe decisively before October. Just as Rommel shook the Americans out of offensive positions in Tunisia, the Germans might daringly attempt to disrupt the vaster forces of an incipient invasion, either in Africa or Britain. Or they may choose to carry out Hitler's published intent, solidify the defenses of western and southern Europe, and prepare yet another summer blow at Russia, where they are still within 125 miles of Moscow. In any one of these events, time, for a change is on the side of the Germans.
*The Red Army rallied few celebrants in the U.S. How far the U.S. was from Britain in outward appreciation of Russia was suggested by what Columnist Westbrook Pegler wrote three days after Red Army Day: "Communism is, for a fact, a menace to the United States. . . . But Hitler happens to be the military enemy of the moment and first things come first."
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.