WESTERN THEATRE: Side Door

WESTERN THEATRESide Door

Scores, hundreds, thousands of French, British, Germans—seasoned survivors of World War I as well as fresh-faced fodder for World War II—suffered painful, personal wounds or death along the Perl-to-Lauterbourg front last week. So did hundreds of pigs which the French Infantry drove before them to locate and detonate concealed land mines. Yet B. Mussoliniwas not unduly cynical when he said: “Europe is not yet actually at war. The masses of the armies have not yet clashed” (see p. 22).

For it was true that, hideous though local scenes were—a shell lighting on the crew of a pillbox, a riddled fighting plane screeching to its crash, a forest suddenly illuminated at night by roaring red dynamite, a man crawling back through the grass to an aid station—they were as nothing compared to what could & would take place when one side or other turned loose its full offensive power. When & where that offensive would come remained inscrutable at the end of the war’s third week, but major stirrings and preparations, monstrous massing of men on both sides, boded cataclysm soon.

The British War Secretary, Leslie Hore-Belisha, made a quick trip to Paris. Two days later the French members of the Supreme War Council, Premier Edouard Daladier and Generalissimo Maurice Gustave Gamelin, accompanied by several aides, flew secretly to England and met “somewhere in Sussex,” in a quiet town hall, with their British colleagues. Munitions and food supply were said to have been the chief agenda. French mobilization was announced as having been finally completed (after 17 days of war), with 3,500,000 men under arms in a zone 15 to 30 miles deep behind the Maginot Line. Artillery pounding, mostly by night to escape the eyes of aviation, grew heavier and heavier. Also heavier grew the atmosphere of suspense as the Allies watched corresponding mobilization behind the Westwall.

The German Commander-in-Chief, Colonel General Walther von Brauchitsch, was reported to have arrived from Poland on the Western Front, with headquarters at Bingen.* The No. 4 Nazi, Rudolf Hess, was reported making a tour of the entire Westwall. The chief of the Nazi labor battalions, Robert Ley, was known to be here & there behind the Wall, driving his men to complete and strengthen the fortifications behind which Germany was preparing either a permanent stand or a counteroffensive the nature of which was darkly dramatized by A. Hitler’s reference in Danzig to “a weapon with which we cannot be attacked” (see p. 50).

Of deepest concern to the Allies were German activities on the upper reaches of their Westwall. As far north as Wesel and Emmerich, where the Rhine turns west to enter the Netherlands, workers were observed completing casemates and tank traps opposite the neutral Dutch soil. Why? Near Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) just across the border from the Limburg point which runs down between Germany and Belgium, heavy concentrations of Nazi airplanes were reported, and heavy new concentrations of ground troops, apparently brought over from the Polish front. Why?

In Berlin, Chief Propagandist Goebbels denied that Germany was getting ready to violate the Low Countries’ neutrality. Another explanation might be that from Germany’s nearest points to England and the Channel she was planning an air war on British shipping, to back up her submarine attacks on Britain’s food supply. But Allied and neutral apprehensions inclined toward the explanation denied by Dr. Goebbels. From near Aachen the great German juggernaut started rolling 25 years ago. Transit of the Lowlands has always been the basic principle of German war to the west. Nature made it so long before the Maginot Line was built.

Last time, seven German armies were concentrated on the French border. The Sixth and Seventh, under Prince Rupprecht and General Herringen, respectively, were massed above and below Strasbourg to drive into the valley of the Moselle. The northern five were to execute the famed “swinging door” plan of Count Alfred von Schlieffen (see map, p. 28).

Hinge of the “door” was the Fifth Army commanded by the German Crown Prince Starting from the Trier-Saarbrtücken area (where fighting is most active this time), his course was through Luxembourg and Longwy in a short arc southwest to Verdun. The Fourth Army, under Duke Albrecht, was to swing in a wider arc through Luxembourg into the dense Ardennes forest, cross the Meuse and the Aisne northwest of the Crown Prince’s Army, and sweep south toward Châlons. Other concentric arcs were mapped for the Third and Second Armies under Generals Hausen and Buülow, respectively, who jumped off from between Aachen and Trier. Hausen’s objective before swinging south was near Namur on the Meuse inBelgium. Billow’s course pointed for Maubeuge on the French frontier after cracking through the forts at Liége in conjunction with the First Army. That Army, mobilized north of Aachen and led in under the Limburg tip of The Netherlands by General Alexander von Kluck, was, after passing Liége, to execute the widest, swiftest swing of all through Belgium, to envelop the French left flank and its unready British supports, to sweep around through Paris, to herd the French Army away from the city toward its eastern frontier where it might be surrounded.

By the terms of her neutrality, Belgium was not mobilized when Germany struck on August 4. Within twelve days all her Liége forts fell and Kluck rushed westward, intending to smash the Belgian Army at Jette. The Belgians retreated into fortified Antwerp, where he bottled them and passed by.

French resistance along the northwestern frontier was weak, though brave, because the French had not anticipated so wide a movement against them. While Kluck and Bülow drove through British resistance at Mons, the main French offensive, in the Ardennes, failed. The Third and Fourth German Armies crushed through on schedule, and the retreat to the Marne, though orderly, was saved from being a rout with Paris captured only because General Helmuth von Moltke, the German Commander in Chief: 1) weakened Kluck’s Army by taking from it troops to police Belgium, 2) abandoned the classic outline of the Schlieffen Plan by letting Kluck swing east of Paris instead of west. Kluck further messed up the Plan by chasing the retreating French after Bülow, on his left, had halted, thus exposing his own flank. But for these errors Moltke might have accomplished the extraordinary feat of taking Paris in 26 days by the simple process of entering a neutral side door. As it was, he got so far in that it took the Allies, with U. S. help, four years to eject the invader.

This time the side door to France, while not so strong as her eastern portals, is doubly locked and bolted. Within France along the Belgian border runs an extension of the Maginot Line, not continuous but strategically clumped. Across the border is a Belgian Army, fully mobilized last week to 300,000 strong (instead of the 42,000 available in 1914). The Belgian fort system at Liége and southeast through Battice and Eupen to Malmédy backed up by another system along the Meuse around Namur, is rebuilt on modern lines and stands behind a frontier fringe of trenches and pillboxes. Behind the fort system runs a “Little Maginot Line” constructed with French engineering assistance and, back of that, all the way from Liége around to Antwerp, runs the new Albert Canal: 250 ft. wide, 15 to 20 ft. deep, built as a military obstacle with machine-gun and rapid-fire artillery emplacements along it. long the bank nearest Germany, all trees and underbrush have been removed to give a clear field for defensive fire. The confident Allied view is that if Germany should strike again from Aachen, the Belgians could hold her until French and British forces could come up at least to the canal and the secondary defense behind the Liége forts. In command of Belgian defense is General E. M. Van den Bergen, who has been busy on plans and works since the Belgian Parliament voted to intensify them in 1935.

Belgium was suspiciously alert last week but denied having taken yet her most drastic defense step of all: pulling plugs in the Albert Canal to impede any German advance with a flood. The Dutch, however, did say they were flooding their country, at least experimentally, around Utrecht. Much weaker than the ‘Belgians in fortifications along their frontier, the Dutch prepared if necessary to open their Zuider Zee dikes and inundate most of their central provinces, abandoning their entire northeast to the invader and taking national refuge in the Rotterdam-Utrecht-Amsterdam triangle. To give their waters time to rise, the Dutch mined all roads and bridges entering their country from Germany. They erected tank obstructions and traps, leaving only one lane open for normal traffic on each highway bridge. Their Army stood mobilized at about 650,000 under Lieut. General I. H. Reynbers, 60, a short, jolly infantryman who was the personal appointee of Queen Wilhelmina five years ago.

> Italian dispatches described bulletproof metal vests, arm and leg armor and full-faced helmets worn by German soldiers sent out to cut wire.

> French accounts agreed with Polish, that most German pilots captured were youths of 19, 20, 21. The seasoned Nazi Condor squadron of Spanish Civil War fame was reported to have reached the Western Front from Poland. French pilots claimed to have proved that their U. S.-built Curtiss pursuit ships will outfly the Nazis’ much-touted Messerschmidts.

> As the War’s third week ended, the French reported severe German counterattacks on the Blies Valley salient to relieve French pressure on Zweibrücken. A mass of fast light German tanks was said to have been smashed up at the French wire by anti-tank fire, the wreckage of 20 of them blocking the passage of heavier German tanks. German counterattacks in the Bienwald east of Bitche were evidently more successful. At the northwest end of the line, the French advance from Perl in the direction of Trier progressed yard by yard. Then, this week, along the 80-mile Rhine front from Lauterbourg to Basle, the guns of the Maginot Line and the Westwall thundered at each other the first shots in that sector since the war began. As this activity lengthened into the night of its first 24 hours, throngs gathered on the Swiss shore of Lake Constance, awed at the fireworks of a French aerial foray, apparently against the Zeppelin plant at Friedrichshafen, now devoted to building airplane engines. Onlookers counted 30 bombs, watched Nazi tracer bullets seek out the enemy. Berlin denied any appreciable damage to the plant, claimed eight French planes had been downed.

*Berlin sources said that the German High Command, convinced that the war would be a long one, planned a monster G. H. Q. on a mountaintop, strong enough to withstand any bombardment.