Turnabout

Dribbles of truth in a gushing torrent of rumor gave a veiled outline of the Germans' departure from the Balkans. On a front which a month ago had been held by 100 divisions, the Nazis now had left 15 Hungarian and 35 German divisions, but 25 Rumanian, 25 Bulgarian had departed, some of them to fight on the other side. Now the Germans were desperately rushing new defenders, scraped up somehow, to hold at the Danube.

Typical of the Balkan reversal was Marshal Tito's new role. Having fought for years to get the Germans out of Yugoslavia, he was now mobilizing all his forces to prevent the enemy from escaping. Coming to help him were the Russians, who had rolled past Sofia across Bulgaria to within 200 miles of the Adriatic. If an Allied landing now followed in the Balkans, the Germans left in Greece and the Aegean would be cut off, like the Germans in southwest France. Then Yugoslavia and the Hungarian plains would offer Allied armies an open invitation to Budapest and Vienna.

Westward in Italy Field Marshal Albert Kesselring still held out against an Allied attack that boiled along the length of the Gothic Line from the Ligurian Sea to the Adriatic, still kept his army intact, more than a year after the landing at Salerno.

But the Allied Fifth and Eighth Armies --including British, Canadians, Poles, Greeks, Indians, Palestinians, Brazilians, French, Tunisians. Senegalese, and U.S. (white, Negro and Nisei) troops--were making headway. If Rimini falls, the way will lie open into the Po valley and the Gothic Line will be flanked. Last week in the course of this fighting, another nation was precipitated, almost unnoticed, into the abyss of war.

In the mountains above Rimini the world's smallest republic, claiming to be Europe's oldest state, with 38 square miles of mountain territory and 12,900 inhabitants, accepted its fate with dignity. San Marino's Government decided that its Army of 78 men could not oppose the Wehrmacht, yielded to the German demand to open its roads. Allied artillery replied with gunfire.

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