Foreign News: Three Years Ago

International

Early one morning three years ago this week the curtains of Adolf Hitler’s study in Berlin’s huge Reich Chancellery stirred gently in the breeze. Inside, after seven nearly sleepless days of conferences and feverish meditation, the demoniac leader of Germany had reached his decision. A few minutes later, and hundreds of miles away, a German bomber snarled through the grey, drizzling Polish dawn and dropped a missile on the fishing village and air base of Puck. World War II had begun.

Lost Illusions. The world had held its breath since the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact eleven days previously. Now it breathed again, not with relief but with the sense of destiny ineluctably on the march. On countless lips was Sir Edward Grey’s despairing cry of World War I that the lamps were going out all over Europe. Many genuinely feared that Europe would next be illumined by the fires of Hitler’s rage. But a great number of the citizens of the Democracies, nervous though they were, felt a great deal less tragic than Edward Grey had sounded. They were able to bolster themselves with a variety of illusions.

It was not in poor Poland that they placed their faith. Poland’s dictator. General Edward Smigly-Rydz, bravely declared: “We shall win by the Holy Passion of our Lord. He will lead us to victory.” Poland’s passionate Catholics and her skull-capped Jews, marked by tens of thousands for Nazi execution, resolutely dug in for the defense of their country. But the world outside felt in its bones that Poland was digging its own grave.

France, however, was another story. As it had during many months of facile prophecy, the democratic world looked to France to provide the first mighty upset to Hitler’s calculations. Did not France’s spruce, civilized generals, packed with the lore of St. Cyr. command the smartest army in the world? Was it not based on the impregnable subterranean bastions of the Maginot Line? Furthermore, in these early days of September 1939, the Maginot Line was widely regarded, not as a defensive masterpiece alone, but also as an ideal point of departure for an invasion of Germany. Amateur strategists pointed out that France’s possession of the escarpments of Alsace-Lorraine, jutting east toward Germany, made her invasion chances vastly superior to those of 1914. The democratic world waited for General Maurice Gamelin to start. Few detected any symbolic menace in the frivolities of Paris, continuing despite blackout and mobilization. The city’s latest dither was occasioned by an attempt by the couturier Mainbocher* to bring back the Victorian wasp-waisted corset, as ill-adapted to modern habits as was the French High Command to the blitz technique that Berlin was perfecting over the French horizon.

Lost Umbrellas. Buttressing the keen military insight of France, of course, was the dogged valor of Britain. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who had just refused to lend his umbrella to a London exhibition of notable walking sticks, did public penance for the appeasements of his past. To Parliament he stated: “Everything I had worked for, hoped for and believed in during my public life has cracked into ruins. There is only one thing left for me, and that is to devote what strength and power I have to forwarding the victory.”

On his way to Parliament on another day the Prime Minister bumped into a sandwich man carrying a sign bearing the single word CHURCHILL. But such annoyances did not prevent suffering Neville Chamberlain from restoring Winston Churchill, Member of Parliament for Epping, to his old position as First Lord of the Admiralty and telling him: “I would be most grateful if you’ll help me now.” Churchill had warned Britain that civilization was about to explode. Now at last the British were beginning to believe there might be something to it. Some 600,000 children were evacuated from London. The pandas, chimpanzees and orangutans in Regent’s Park were removed to remote Whipsnade. Britain’s great friend J. P. Morgan canceled the grouse shooting on his Scottish moor. In their darkened cities the British took comfort in thoughts of the great Royal Navy riding somewhere on the North Sea tides.

Lost Opportunities. There were many solaces for the Democracies in those ominous hours. Blustering Benito Mussolini, whose armies had swaggered across the rotogravure sections for years, seemed afraid to lead his impoverished nation to war. The French were at his borders and he lost no time in broadcasting a telegram from Adolf Hitler: “I do not think I shall require military assistance from Italy.” It was no secret that this caused wild jubilation inside Italy, and it even seemed possible that Anglo-French diplomacy might win Italy to the Allied cause. Moreover the comical little blowhards of Japan had manifestly been scared out of their kimonos by the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Loudmouthed Premier Baron Kiichiro Hiranuma’s bristling Cabinet had resigned, and the obscure, retired General Nobuyuki Abe who succeeded him admitted that “Japan will have a troubled future.”

In those first bewildering hours of war the Democracies overlooked many significant events. Congratulating themselves on having long recognized the devilish blood-brotherhood of Hitler and Stalin, they ignored a remark by Soviet Foreign Commissar Viacheslav Molotov which told much about the Nazi-Soviet Pact and Russia’s real relations with Germany. Said Molotov: “The art of diplomacy lies in decreasing, not increasing, the number of one’s enemies.” Marshal Klimenti Voroshilov’s declaration that Russia’s army was prepared to fight alone anytime and win alone anywhere was laughed off as braggadocio. And when India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, arriving in Chungking, received the biggest welcome ever given to a foreign visitor, the Democracies saw no reason to ponder the ambitions of those peoples who do not happen to have white skins.

Lost Adolescence. Three years ago when the Democracies said that Europe’s lights were going out, few wholly believed it, and fewer still perceived that the darkness was spreading beyond Europe and over the whole world. The general temper of the U.S. was reflected in many remarks by eminent citizens. It could be gathered from the comment by U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s Joseph P. Kennedy: “The United States desires peace. . . . You cannot run down a customer with a bayonet.” When Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked if the U.S. could stay out of war, he mused a while and answered, “I not only sincerely hope so, but I believe we can.” And even after Germany assaulted Poland, Henry Ford broke the quiet of Sudbury, Mass. with the opinion: “They don’t dare have a war and they know it. It’s all a big bluff. I don’t know Hitler personally, but at least Germany keeps its people at work.”

Then began the events which, in three short years, matured the world in the knowledge that the conflict had no boundaries anywhere in the world:

1939

Sept. 1—Germany invades Poland.

Sept. 17—Russia invades Poland.

Sept. 28—Warsaw falls.

Nov. 30—Russia invades Finland. 1940

Apr 9—Germany invades Denmark and Norway.

May 10—Germany invades Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg.

May 11—British Prime Minister Chamberlain resigns, Winston Churchill succeeds him.

May 29—Britain announces that the evacuation from Dunkirk is already under way.

June 10—Italy declares war.

June 14—Paris falls.

June 22—Germany and France sign armistice.

July 3—Britain seizes French ships, attacks French Fleet at Oran.

July 30—Pan-American Conference passes resolution of mutual assistance against attack on any American nation.

July 31—Roosevelt declares embargo on oil and scrap exports, aimed at Japan.

Aug. 12—Air blitz on Britain begins.

Sept. 13—Italian army invades Egypt.

Sept. 16—Roosevelt approves Selective Service.

Sept. 22—French Indo-China permits limited occupation by Japan.

Oct. 28—Italy invades Greece.

Dec. 9—Britain begins Libyan offensive.

1941

Mar. 11—Roosevelt signs Lend-Lease Act.

Apr. 6—Hitler invades Yugoslavia and Greece.

Apr. 3-12—German-Italian troops recapture Bengasi, Bardia, Derna, Salûm.

Apr. 27—Greek campaign ends with fall of Athens.

May 19—Italian forces in Ethiopia surrender to British.

June 8—British and Fighting French invade Syria.

June 22—Germany invades Russia.

July 7—Roosevelt announces landing of U.S. forces in Iceland.

Aug. 14—Atlantic Charter.

Aug. 25—Britain and Russia move into Iran.

Sept. 11—Roosevelt orders Navy to sink U-boats found in U.S. waters.

Oct. 17—General Hideki Tojo forms new Cabinet in Japan.

Dec. 7—Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Wake Island, Guam.

Dec. 24—Wake Island falls.

Dec. 25—Hong Kong falls.

1942

Jan. 2—Japan occupies Manila.

Jan. 11—Japan invades Netherlands Indies.

Jan. 23—Japan invades New Britain.

Jan. 26—First A.E.F. lands in Ireland.

Feb. 15—Singapore surrenders.

Feb. 24—U.S. raids Japanese -occupied Wake.

Feb. 27—Japan invades Java.

March 4—U.S. raids Japanese Marcus Island.

March 17—MacArthur arrives in Australia.

March 25—Japan occupies Andaman Islands.

Apr. 9—Bataan Peninsula occupied by Japan.

Apr. 11—India rejects Sir Stafford Cripps’s offer of post-war Indian independence.

Apr. 25—A.E.F. occupies New Caledonia.

May 6—Corregidor surrenders.

May 7—Diego-Suarez, Vichy naval base on Madagascar, surrenders to Britain.

May 9—Allied forces beat Japan in Battle of the Coral Sea.

May 30—R.A.F. devastates Cologne, beginning large-scale bombings of German industrial cities.

June 1—Mexico declares war on the Axis.

R.A.F. continues bombings, at Essen.

June 3—Japan raids Dutch Harbor.

June 6—U.S. forces drive Japs back from Midway Islands.

June 13—Japan occupies Attu and Kiska Islands in the Aleutians.

July 3—Sevastopol falls to Germany.

Aug. 7—U.S. Marines attack Solomon Islands.

Aug. 8—Gandhi voted power to invoke civil disobedience.

Aug. 22—Brazil declares war.

Aug. 30—Rommel begins another African push.

*Now in Manhattan, he has just designed the chic uniforms of the U.S. WAVES.