War Without End?

While U.S. tanks clanked into the suburbs of Paris, the London News Chronicle's political correspondent, E. P. Montgomery, brooded over a nightmare that worries a lot of other people: by going underground the Nazis might be able to prolong the war indefinitely.

Groaned Correspondent Montgomery: "The war [in Germany] will go on-underground. Allied military patrols will be ambushed . . . administrators assassinated . . . commanders will die mysteriously. . . . Hitler and the Nazis--particularly Himmler--have learned from their own bitter experience how effective the underground resistance can be. . . .

"There will be a strange reluctance on the part of every German to accept any post of responsibility under the Allied military authorities. A Nazi equivalent of our word 'quisling' will be invented and whispered from mouth to mouth, and when one or two of them have been found beaten to death with the most fiendish tortures, every 'good' German will know what it means. . . .

"[The Nazis] intend to turn their hard-learned lessons against the Allies in the hope that eventually the Allied Governments will get so sick of it they will withdraw their occupying forces, leaving Germany once more to what is left of the Nazis. . . . It is not a pretty prospect, this war without end the Nazis are planning."

Correspondent Montgomery may have underestimated the difficulty of maintaining an underground movement without support from outside. But he had pointed up one possibility: all the shooting of this war may not end abruptly on one happy Armistice Day when people can hang out flags and dance in the streets.

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