SWISS-BELGIUM: High Time

Unlike the Swiss Navy, the Swiss Army is no myth, no joke. Equipped with expensiveSwiss repeating rifles. Swiss infantrymen rightly consider themselves a corps d’élite. In a pinch Switzerland, since she puts all her able-bodied males into compulsory military training at 20 and keeps them in her reserve until they are 48, can mobilize overnight an army of nearly 260,000, more than twice the size of Germany’s treaty-restricted Reichswehr. At the drop of a floppy Swiss hat or the sound of a warning yodel. Swiss President Dr. Edmund Schulthess can send ten squadrons of Swiss battle planes roaring up into the blue ozone above his Alps. Last week matter-of-fact Swiss War Minister Rudolf Minger marched into a budget session of the Swiss National Council (House of Representatives) and crisply declared: “It has come to my knowledge that a German plan exists for the invasion of Switzerland. . . . What is disquieting is the small importance they seem to attach to the Swiss Army’s powers of resistance. … It is high time for Switzerland to act!” The real German threat, as the National Council well knew, is potential—repre-sented not by the small Reichswehr of today but by Nazi Germany’s colossal brownshirt army of a few years hence, for which the Reichswehr will supply super-trained officers.Last week Swiss War Minister Minger, who has had to keep his entire military establishment going this year on only 92,600,000 Swiss francs ($26,000,000), asked for 120,000,000 francs ($33,700,000) “to replenish arms and military equipment.” Promptly the Council voted 20,000,000 francs, resolved to vote the rest after Adolf Hitler blasted Europe’s hopes for Disarmament Day before in Brussels the Belgian Cabinet met as a Council of State with King Albert in the chair. Defense Minister Albert de Veze asked three-quarters of a billion francs ($152,000,000) to be spent over the next two years on strengthening Belgium’s German frontier and also her Dutch frontier—on the theory that the next German invasion may come through Holland. With the whole Belgian people aroused in recent months by fear of Hitlerism, King Albert & Cabinet unanimously approved the new defense program. “I am certain,” cried War Minister de Veze, “that Parliament—in view of our action today—will give proof of the same patriotic determination and vote the necessary sums.”