World Battlefronts, STRATEGY: Listen to the Thunder

Invasion talk was never louder than it was last week. There was a nervous scramble across the whole continent of Europe. Alarms, warnings, hints flowed from Allied, Axis and neutral capitals:

> A radio voice crackled in French ears: “Listen to the thunder of the guns and planes. Do you hear, M. Laval?” The voice was reading a letter broadcast to M. Laval from General Henri Giraud in Algiers. Cried the voice: “You say we are traitors. But it is we who will save France. . . .”

> London reported that German civilians were streaming out of Spain, took this to mean that Hitler had probably abandoned any idea of marching to Gibraltar through Franco territory.

> German Labor Commissioner Fritz Sauckel demanded the conscription of 150,000 Frenchmen to work on the Mittelmeerwall (Mediterranean Wall), the defensive fortifications which are supposed to extend from Spain to Alexandroupolis near the border of Turkey (see map).

> The Berlin radio reminded jittery Italians that the war was becoming a defense of Italian soil. The Italian press loudly reminded the people of Sicily that they must act with courage “the nearer the danger approached.”

> Rome stepped up preparations for civilian mobilization (see p. 32).

> The Moscow radio said that Erwin Rommel was already in Italy to take command of ground forces. Moscow also declared that Axis authorities, preparing for a mass evacuation from Tunisia, had set up hospitals in Naples to care for 90,000 men. Madrid said that the Axis had assembled 350,000 tons of shipping.

> Vichy reported that great convoys of Allied ships had moved into the Mediterranean. The last big convoys reported by Nazi sources at Gibraltar carried Allied invasion forces to North Africa.

> Bulgaria’s bald, 49-year-old King Boris III journeyed last week to Adolf Hitler’s general headquarters. Hitler reportedly demanded: 1) six Bulgarian divisions for the defense of the Black and Aegean Sea coasts; 2) five additional Bulgarian divisions to replace an equal number of Germans in Serbia, thus easing Hitler’s critical war manpower situation; 3) curfews, civilian evacuations and other extraordinary measures in Bulgaria’s coastal areas. The Germans apparently expected an invasion through Bulgaria into middle Europe. Boris also understood the possibility. Bulgarians were asked “to endure with patience and calmness the trials about to be faced.”

> Ankara also reported that the Axis feared attack in the eastern Mediterranean, was therefore shifting troops from garrisons in the northern Aegean Sea to islands in the south: Crete, Rhodes, rocky and forbidding Scarpanto.

>Britain’s Herbert Morrison, Minister of Home Security, designated new, extensive coastal strips in England and Scotland which might be banned to civilian visitors at a moment’s notice, possibly an indication that the Allied blow—when it came—would fall in the north rather than the south. “The time has come,” said Morrison, “when the question of access to coastal areas must be considered . . . from the point of view of the use of this country as a base for offensive operations against the enemy.”