Questions

London's News Chronicle felt a "sense of big events to come." Britons remembered Winston Churchill's prophecy of last June: "Very probably there will be heavy fighting in the Mediterranean and elsewhere before the leaves of autumn fall." From within and without Festung Europa, men scanned the pattern:

> What was taking place on the heights of Quebec, where Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt talked all day and deep into the night? Was a decision being forged that would unleash the mightiest blows of World War II? (see p. 17).

> What was the significance of the promotion of Lieut. General Sir Bernard Charles Tolver Paget to full general? Did it mean that doughty Sir Bernard, veteran of 1940's Battle of Norway, commander of Britain's Home Forces, father of the realistic, live-ammunition "battle-school" training system, had been secretly assigned to lead an invasion?

> What portents lay in the massive bombing of northern France? Was this prelude to a thrust across the Channel, the second front the Russians wanted? (see p. 33).

> What but an invasion would follow the unprecedented pounding of southern Italy? General Eisenhower said that his battle-seasoned armies, now three miles from the European mainland, "were ready to go at any minute." (see p. 29).

> What other chores might be assigned to Allied ships and men assembled in the Mediterranean? The long-expected move toward the Balkans? Toward Sardinia? Toward southern France?

> What urgency spurred Anglo-American broadcasts to Europe's chafing underground? The London radio said: "You who belong to resistance groups of specialists know already that your services are wanted on day J at hour H." The Algiers radio told the people of Occupied Europe to "perfect all preparations in the shortest possible time."

> What guided the Germans to put Norway under virtual martial law? To make fresh demands for collaboration from Denmark's stubborn government? A mounting wave of sabotage? Or fear of an Allied sweep across the North Sea?

> What prompted restrictions on civilian movements along the southern English coast? Did the ban on seashore visitors, the barbed-wire barricades and cement blocks on certain roads, presage an invasion of the continent?

One thing was certain: the Allies had raised these questions to screen their activity and to confuse the enemy, and they would write the answers. Now they, and not the Germans, wheeled up the heaviest guns in the war of nerves, just as they, and not the Germans, now marshaled the mightiest weapons in the war of arms.

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