European Front

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THAT huge European “fortress,” completion of which Hitler proclaimed only a few weeks ago as his objective this winter, is undergoing assault upon the outworks. With this sudden and devastating onslaught, Germany’s hope of distracting the United Nations in the West, thereby gaining time to consolidate her Continental position, is proving delusive.

The long-awaited Allied offensive has begun — not along the fortified coasts of Western Europe but in the deserts of Egypt. There the outer ramparts of Hitler’s fortress have been overrun and destroyed already. The bulwark of Axis power in Northeast Africa, Marshal Erwin Rommel’s famous Afrika Korps, whose task it was to hold the gate to Hitler’s citadel on its weakest side by threatening irruption into the Middle East, has been smashed.

This defeat bears little resemblance to reverses experienced hitherto by Axis arms in Libya and Egypt. Its consequences are certain to be far more serious. Despite the smallness of Rommel’s army in Africa when compared with the enormous dimensions of the German host in Russia, the Afrika Korps was a resounding symbol of German scientific warfare. Its four Nazi divisions, together with eleven Italian divisions, represented the pick of both nations. To the extraordinary competence of its commander, even his opponents paid tribute.

In an hour when the tides of adversity have been running high for Hitler in Eastern Europe, Rommel and his achievements have been a lodestar to German hopes. On every previous occasion when Britain’s Eighth Army has enjoyed brief success against him, the might of German arms and the reverberations of German successes in Europe have minimized Rommel’s reverses. The debacle which has now overtaken the Afrika Korps finds German morale at its lowest ebb in the war. Worse still — from the Nazi point of view — this disaster has shattered the carefully devised German war plan.

It has smashed the lower arm of Hitler’s pincer thrust toward the Middle East at precisely the moment when the northern arm of that pincer maneuver has been deranged and paralyzed by Russian valor in the Caucasus.

Hitler’s headache

To add to the impact and import for the Germans of this desert disaster, British, American, and South African air power in the Eastern Mediterranean has assumed such proportions as to cancel all prospects of rehabilitating Rommel’s African Army through reinforcements unless the Luftwaffe, now widely dispersed, is reconcentrated.

Such concentration would entail stripping the Russian front of much of its air power — which would mean yielding air superiority to Marshal Semyon Timoshenko at the moment he is preparing to loose his winter offensive. Or it would mean calling back the Air Fleet from the shores of the Arctic — which would at once clear the northern supply route for the United Nations to Murmansk. Or it would involve a weakening of German air defenses in Western Europe — precisely at the time when the RAF and the American Air Command in Britain are inaugurating their most intensive schedule of bombing raids upon the Reich itself.

Repercussions from the North African desert jar Hitler’s fortress throughout Europe.

Mussolini’s misery

Italy, already sick and weary of the misfortunes of war, has suffered an even more momentous catastrophe in the North African melee than her Axis partner. In the First World War, Austria-Hungary became a liability to Germany during the final year of the conflict. In this war Italy may yet fill a similar role in relation to the Third Reich.

Deterioration of Italy’s war strength. — which Mussolini has been spending since 1935, — the heavy subtractions which the war has made from her naval power and merchant marine, the insatiable levies imposed by Hitler to fill in the gaps on the Russian front, the latest increases in the number of Gestapo agents filtered into Italy’s national administration, the advent of Nazi foremen in all Italian industries this fall, the terrible devastation inflicted upon cities of the industrial North by recent British air assaults — these have broken Italian morale badly.

Now, with her arsenal cities being bombed to impotence, her ancient ports reduced to rubble, her six finest remaining divisions bled white or taken prisoner in Egypt, Italy faces the ultimate calamity toward which her notorious exponent of “sacro egoismo” has conducted her. Should the United Nations accomplish their design of wiping out all Axis forces in Libya and Tripolitania. Italy may find herself transformed into a battleground through invasion.

Double-barreled offensive

The double-barreled offensive of the Allies in Africa has blasted the outer ramparts of Hitler’s fortress in the Southwestern Mediterranean as portentously as along its eastern approaches. Vichy France finds herself snared at last in the tangle of her own deceptions.

The shock has been rude. It has brought to a conclusion the pretenses upon which Laval fashioned his claim to speak for a people who detest him as the betrayer of the spirit of France. Vichy has awakened to find an AEF, ferried and protected by the British and American navies, landing at a dozen points along the Mediterranean and Atlantic sea rim of the great French African Empire.

Invasion of French North and West Africa has revealed, in the brief time which has elapsed since it began, the cracks and fissures running through the structure of Vichy controls in Algeria, Morocco, and the five southern colonies governed from Dakar on the African “bulge.” General Giraud’s clear voice, ringing over the radio from Rabat with clarion cry that France’s hour of deliverance was at hand, the mutiny of Colonial regiments, the immediate unraveling of civil war as supporters of General de Gaulle strove to curb opposition to the invaders, the swift development of sabotage against Vichy’s apparatus for defense, the succession of rapid surrenders — all attest how ramshackle and unreal are the foundations upon which the PétainLaval regime has endeavored to base authority over a people bred in the traditions of liberty.

Although Tunisia, easternmost colony of France in North Africa, has been ignored in the earlier phases of the invasion by the American expeditionary forces and their British allies, its close association with Algeria and Morocco in the economic organization of the invaded regions was certain to bring involvement in this Allied undertaking. This rich province directly borders Tripolitania, and offers the most direct route to the key Axis seaport — Tripoli.

The role which Tunisia plays in the German war economy is too important to be ignored, even if her geographic status were less vital to Hitler’s program, and if the great French naval base at Bizerta were nonexistent. Tunisia is the California of Metropolitan France — the most intensively cultivated and prolific of all French African possessions: the fruit basket and cereal bin of the French Empire. Out of its rich production Vichy has obediently drawn large food supplies to Marseilles, where Hitler’s economic policemen have consistently appropriated the larger share.

What of Dakar?

Whoever controls the coastal regions of the French Mediterranean provinces and the Atlantic coast of Morocco controls Dakar as effectively as if that key naval base on the African “bulge" were actually occupied. Lying nearly 1400 miles south of Casablanca, with no overland communications tying it into the excellent rail and highway network stretching from Tunisia to the Atlantic coast of Morocco, Dakar is now cut off entirely from all contact with the Mediterranean and the home ports of France. Concentrations of American, British, and Fighting French troops in British Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and French Equatorial Africa similarly isolate it from the south. Allied naval forces can seal up its ships.

The same reason which underlies the choice made by the invasion forces of the United Nations in selecting Algeria and Morocco for attack — communication facilities — explains why Dakar has been ignored for the time being.

The reverse in the Eastern Desert and the powerful blow at West and North Africa plainly imply that the invasion of Hitlerite Europe from the south is the great objective of Allied strategy. This has already been recognized by the Führer. His enraged denunciation of American and British opponents as “gangsters,”and his shrill insistence that he will refuse to emulate the Kaiser, reveal the dimensions of the dilemma he sees rising before him. It is impossible, within the time at his disposal and considering his needs on the Russian front, to build any Maginot Lines of defense along the coasts of France, Italy, Albania, and Greece in the Mediterranean.

To add to the complexity of the problem of defending the shores of the Northern Mediterranean, the populations dwelling in the lower Balkan Peninsula are actively in arms against their German overlords. The task of mounting adequate fortifications in the wild and rugged country stretching from Albania to Turkish Thrace is beyond even the great talents available to the Wehrmacht. Here is no littoral favorable to the type of defense works the Germans have built in France and the Low Countries — and tested with such success at Dieppe.

Russia and Turkey

Meantime on the East, despite the weight of the struggle this past year, Russia’s spokesmen have ushered in the winter with the announcement that the armed strength of the Soviet Union is today greater than it was a year ago. Germany faces another dreaded winter offensive from that quarter. Stalin’s extraordinary address in early November has confirmed Germany’s fears.

The difficulties Hitler has experienced in establishing a suitable winter line in the Caucasus have had important consequences. Instead of attempting to hammer his way through the inhospitable and heavily defended Caucasus Mountains, Hitler may decide to try to flank this obstacle. Since the only other approaches to Germany’s objectives in this whole region lie through Turkey, the position of that neutral on the Straits of the Bosporus has suddenly become critical.

Hitler holds the Crimea. This provides him with a springboard for Turkey’s Black Sea coast. His army might easily leap the narrow Straits of the Bosporus from Turkish Thrace. From Greece he could send his forces swarming against Turkey’s Aegean flank. Such a synchronized attack would be extremely difficult for the Turks to counter because it would spread their defense forces thin along hundreds of miles of coast. Also, a drive in that quarter would crash the gates to the oil of Iraq while turning Russia’s flank below the Caucasus. It might divert part of the British Eighth Army from Egypt, thus assisting Rommel.

This situation explains the sudden din of alarm bells at Ankara, where the growing might of the Allies has elicited a blunt promise to meet any German attack with the full weight of Turkish arms.

WHAT TO WATCH

Germany’s attitude toward Turkey.

The Fighting French forces in Chad. They may try to punch toward Tripoli from Central Africa.

German moves to counter a probable invasion of Italy by the United Nations.

Russia’s winter offensive, now in the making.