WESTERN THEATRE: Storm Warnings

The storm of death which Adolf Hitler promised Great Britain so increased in violence last week that its full blast was expected hourly. From a tentative nocturnal patter, the rain of German air bombs swelled to widespread showers by day, then to fierce successive cloudbursts at all hours, delivered not only by lofty level-flight bombers but by scores of Stukas which dived shrieking to demoralize men on the ground, machine-gunning people and cattle indiscriminately. Iron censorship and brave British disdain concealed the true extent of damages and loss of life, but both rose inevitably as the official daily tallies of shot-down German raiders rose from a half-dozen to a dozen, then to a score. Germany was trying to “soften up” Britain, apparently in preparation for real mass attack, then for invasion. Britain’s chin went up & out as she refused to admit “softening.”

Germany’s attacks ranged from Scotland to the Channel and from the North Sea to the Irish Sea. They were aimed at aircraft and munitions factories, at railroads and other communications, at fighting bases and repair shops of R. N. and R. A. F., at troop concentrations, coastal defense works, port facilities. They were widely scattered to give German squadron leaders practice in reaching numerous objectives, so that when mass raiding began it would be swift and accurate. But the first concentrations of attack were aimed at convoys in the Strait of Dover and at east-coast ports, closing of which to all British shipping, naval as well as merchant, was a prerequisite of invasion.

Up to this week, east-coast sea traffic survived, but repeated poundings set afire a cluster of grain elevators at Southampton, and King George and Prime Minister Winston Churchill had narrow escapes while visiting troops in the southeast defense zone. An inn near the dugout into which Mr. Churchill ducked was cut in two. The proprietor simply moved his public dartboard to an outer wall and served ale to patrons outside through a hole in the masonry.

Measures. British defense measures multiplied as necessity mothered invention. Someone discovered that, whereas a strong stream of water from a hose only spreads a fire ignited by incendiary bombs (thermite”), a gentle sprinkle from a stirrup pump with finely perforated nozzle, like a garden watering can, douses the incandescent particles instead of scattering them. All stores were soon sold out of stirrup pumps.

An improved British magnetic mine was announced, with news that big Bristol Beauforts and Handley Page Hampdens had been sowing them industriously for weeks in German harbors as far east as the Baltic.

Lord Craigavon, plain-spoken Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, announced that he and Prime Minister Eamon de Valera of independent Eire had been unable to agree on a united defense program for Britain’s western back door. Mr. de Valera feared touching off a civil war if, before the Germans came, he let in British soldiers or let the Royal Navy reoccupy its old bases at Berehaven, Lough Swilly and Cobh. The British Army massed troops to rush across the Irish Sea when the hour struck, and R. N. calmly announced new minefields from Scotland to Iceland to Greenland, to prevent the Germans sweeping around to Ireland from the north.

Men. Last fortnight the 3,000,000th Briton was called up for home defense. Last week, with the calling up of 32-year-olds, the number eligible rose to 3,300,000. But trainees were put into khaki only at the rate of 700 per day.

Belatedly the Home Defense chiefs thought of motorcycles, to mount couriers and fighting men to combat parachutists. Private owners were asked to contribute their machines.

Belatedly the Aircraft Production Ministry thought it was going to run short of “aluminium,” called on housewives to contribute objects of rolled “aluminium” such as kitchenware, hair-curlers, shoe trees, cocktail shakers, beer mugs. A few hundred tons trickled in and the Daily Sketch cheerily headlined: “From the Frying Pan Into the Spitfire.”

Belatedly the secret services decided that Admiral Sir Barry Edward Domville, 62, onetime chief of Naval Intelligence and, since his retirement in 1936, an ardent Naziphile, guest in Germany of Hitler, Göring and Gestapo Chief Himmler, head of The Link (British pro-Nazi cell), was a dangerous character. They found and arrested him at his home in Roehampton, jailed also his half-German wife and their son, Compton, 22.

On the eve of fresh and more terrible battle, the King decorated Admiral Sir Charles Morton Forbes, Commander in Chief of the Home Fleet; Air Marshal Arthur Sheridan Barratt, overseas commander of the R. A. F.; Major General Bernard Charles Tolver Paget who directed the “historic” withdrawal from Andalsnes; and 40 members of the armed services from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India and the colonies. To a Mrs. Norman Cardwell, 45-year-old farmer’s wife, he gave the Order of the British Empire for her singlehanded capture of a shot-down Nazi air pilot. Britons devoured her story in the newspapers. Excerpt :

“I saw a man floating to earth with an enormous white thing like a balloon above him. . . .

“I saw him walking along by a hedge in the paddock about 150 yards away from me. He did not seem to be making any effort to take off his equipment and disguise himself as a British soldier so I thought he could not be a parachutist. . . .

“I went towards him and called to him to put up his hands. He did not understand English, so I showed him what I wanted him to do and he did it. . . .

“I said to him: ‘What the dickens do you think you are doing here?’ but of course he didn’t understand me. Then I noticed that he had a revolver and by pointing indicated that I wanted it. He handed it over at once but I did not take it out of the holster nor did I threaten him with it.

“I just walked down the yard with my prisoner going ahead of me. About half a minute afterwards some soldiers came along the road on motorcycles. . . .”

Ripostes by R. A. F. to Germany’s air blows were delivered incessantly upon military, industrial and communications centres all across Naziland to Berlin, northeast to Bergen and Stavanger. Airports, munition dumps and—most ominous—concentrations of barges along the Lowland and French coasts, were targets attacked even in foul weather.* At all costs Britain must interrupt Germany’s preparations, play for time. The Royal Navy’s success in scotching France’s sea power before the Axis could get it was a national bracer. For even if she stood off Blitzkrieg, Britain already faced Blockade. With customary exaggeration, the German High Command last week claimed that, since obtaining Channel and Atlantic bases, their inroads by U-boat, speed boat and aircraft on British shipping now rose toward the high rates achieved during World War I—more than 100,000 tons per week.†

Appeal. Minister of Supply Herbert Stanley Morrison addressed an appeal to the U. S. He said that though Germany had vastly increased her war resources by her conquests to date (steel capacity, for example, up from 31,000,000 tons a year to 42,000,000 tons) Great Britain could yet survive if the U. S. would help, adding 52,000,000 tons of steel, for instance, to Britain’s potential 19,000,000 tons. Cried Minister Morrison as the Battle of Britain began crashing in earnest over the one great free land left in Europe:

“We look to you as our armory and we ask no more than this.

“Britain’s duty to herself and the world is to stand up and fight the good fight. Will you lay your plans in close concert with us and send us in an ever-increasing flood the machines and munitions of victory?”

“London in Ashes.” Prime Minister Winston Churchill made another of his fighting speeches. Excerpts:

“We are fighting by ourselves, alone; but we are not fighting for ourselves, alone. Here in this strong city of refuge which enshrines the title deeds of human progress and is of deep consequence to Christian civilization . . . we await undismayed the impending assault. . . .

“. . . Hitler has not yet been withstood by a great nation with a will power the equal of his own. . . .

“We shall defend every village, every town and every city. The vast mass of London itself, fought street by street, could easily devour an entire hostile army, and we would rather see London laid in ruins and ashes than that it should be tamely and abjectly enslaved. . . .

“. . . We must prepare not only for the summer but for the winter, not only for 1941 but for 1942, when the war will, I trust, take a different form from the defensive in which it has hitherto been bound.”

*Said the Manchester Guardian complacently: “It is almost certain that there are not 50 large transports in the Scheldt at present. . . . The slow-moving barges [from the Rhine] would take from 24 to 46 hours to make the crossing from Antwerp to Dover or to Hull, and as there would be hundreds of them they could hardly hope to escape detection. . . . They would cover so much sea area that our outpost vessels must run into them.” The Guardian took comfort in the belief that the harbors at Boulogne, Calais, Zeebrugge and the Hook of Holland are so clogged with war debris as to be useless.

† The British Ministry of Information, according a palpable hit on the reliability of German claims, declared that according to German reports 15 more British battleships and 92 more British cruisers had been sunk than the British had at the start of the war.