Defense of France

Royal Air Force bombers paid a visit to Nazi Rotterdam one dawn last week. Just to make sure Germany would have fuel trouble in mounting her invasion of Britain, they rebombed the oil storage tanks along the Maas, reported "a great explosion ... lit up the adjoining docks and waterways. Flames rose several hundred feet. ... It is believed they are now totally destroyed."

But German words and acts last week and this week pointed to the heart of France, rather than Britain, as the Nazi juggernaut's next immediate destination. High-flying waves of German bombers paraded over Paris, began a new reign of terror by showering heavy bombs at airfields, factories, railroads. Forty-five people were killed, 149 injured and thousands scared, including U. S. Ambassador Bullitt (see p. 30). Marseille and Lyon were raided by Germans looking for industrial objectives down the Rhone Valley.

The Allied Supreme War Council, meeting in Paris "more unalterably resolved than ever," knew that their paramount task now was to rush strength into Generalissimo Weygand's new Somme-Aisne line from Abbeville to Montmedy (see map). British regiments, first arrivals of a new B. E. F., landed at Le Havre, were sent at once to this line. Attacks were launched at Abbeville and points east to recapture bridgeheads needed to stem the fresh assault which Fuehrer Hitler & Staff were observed preparing. Indicating their lively interest in those bridgeheads, the Germans counterattacked repeatedly. All French infantry divisions, all tanks and artillery that could be spared from France's eastern border were massed and dug in below Amiens, Laon. Rethel. The brief breathing spell gained for Weygand by the northern Armies' heroic stand was now over.

Hitler's new attack, the Allies knew, would be no less terrific than his last. But this time there were probably 100,000 fewer trained German soldiers in the world, and perhaps three times as many wounded whose return through Germany to hospitals in Poland, Moravia and Austria aroused what the Allies believed were the German people's first serious misgivings. Official warnings in Berlin against overoptimism sent Boerse prices, which had boomed, crashing down.

The Allies had learned things about Blitzkrieg and its accessories. It was reported, for example, that the turrets of the 70-ton German break-through tanks (which Germany got by her seizure of the Skoda munitions works in Czechoslovakia) are their vulnerable spot. The quality of German aircraft, the ability of German pilots (many of whom are sent up with minimum flight instruments, obliged to follow-their-leader) were not believed up to Allied par. Allies saw that inferior, half-trained troops were mixed in with the elite. For their own civilian Army ranks they now had a leavening of veterans returning from Dunkirk (see p. 24), whose three weeks in Flanders were as instructive as three years of World War I.

But there was no underestimating of Adolf Hitler's determination to risk his all this summer, or blinking of the fact that the 40 German divisions in the North, including at least five mechanized, which Hitler may have bunged up badly enough to require replacements and reorganization, constituted no more than 20% of his total ground strength. His air strength, even if he had lost 2.100 planes as claimed by the Allies, was still numerically far ahead of the Allies', and the prospects were zero-zero of their catching up inside a year through new planes built at home or in the U. S.

Besides important amounts of materiel and men, France lost great wealth and war resources in the north. Calais is a main source of cement. From Calais through Lille to Valenciennes runs France's richest coal belt. Lille makes textiles and chemicals. Mezieres and Valenciennes are important steel towns. France's beet-sugar industry was in the north, and the entire area, with 85 inhabitants per square kilometer (2/5 sq. mi.) was a rich farm area for corn, barley, cattle, horses. The Germans would go methodically about rehabilitating all these resources, "to make the war pay for itself."

Well the French knew that it is no part of German strategy or character to lose momentum. As the mass bombing of France began this week, it was recognized as execution of the Douhet theory's most frightful phase: to cripple an enemy's factories, transportation, communication, and to demoralize his rear-area population, before smashing his army at the front. That smash, when it came to France, was expected at five points along the Somme-Aisne line, and through the Swiss corner, and almost certainly in combination with harrying action by a new belligerent Italy (see below).

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