(3 of 3)
The first was military weakness. The second was the strategic importance of the country for Germany. With air bases in Holland, the German Air Force would threaten the Allies' troop-&-supply line between Dover and Calais. The Netherlands is also full of tempting loot, including gasoline and oil.
But the greatest danger to The Netherlands, as to other countries Germany wants, was internal. The Netherlands has a small but tight-knit Nazi Party led by Anton Adrian Mussert, a blackshirt. Many younger Army officers are Nazis at heart, out of dissatisfaction with their low social status in a country of burghers and traders. Since last fall Germany has been smuggling Army uniforms out of The Netherlands, smuggling Dutch-uniformed Germans in. That the Government has its eye on Mussert's fifth column was made plain by an announcement which said: "The Government is vigilant and conscious of possible dangers from within."
In the South. In Rumania last week began with the cool murder of a German munitions expert and a female spy by a British agent under Bucharest's Arch of Triumph. In Belgrade cars sped through the streets scattering leaflets bearing the warning: Do not resist Germany if you value your freedom! Hundreds of German "tourists" crossed Hungary into Rumania.
In Albania 50,000 Italian "laborers" were landed from Italian transports. Germany had 100,000 troops concentrated at Bruck on the frontier of Hungary, 200,000 more farther north at Cracow. Russian troops massed at Odessa, a convenient spot for jumping off into Rumania's Bessarabia.
The Italian Navy began "maneuvers" off the Dodecanese Islands not far from the Dardanelles. Fed up with incessant German demands for oil, for wheat, for everything, Rumania's King Carol got his Hohenzollern blood up, clamped down on exports to Germany, snubbed Herr Hitler's pressure-man, Dr. Karl Clodius, who was seen idling about Bucharest. It was reported, denied and reported again that Germany had demanded the right to police the Danube. Once German gunboats appeared on the river, the Balkans would in fact be at war.
Where war would strike first was anybody's guess. Germany had a problem on her hands. Any move against Rumania would be a signal for the destruction of the oil wells. But those German tourists might be going to look at the oil wells.
Italy's laborers might be going to work in Yugoslavia or in Greece. If Italy attacked Greece, however, she would immediately be at war with the Allies, as would Russia if she attacked Rumania—but perhaps not Germany if she took Hungary, last independent part of the old Habsburg empire.
The Italian Navy could be in the Aegean for two purposes: 1) to keep Turkey from opening the Dardanelles to the Allies for a push through the Balkans against Germany; 2) to protect Italy's rear by seizing Salonika if Benito Mussolini had decided to cut himself a slice of the Balkans. As in the North, Russia was not expected to move until somebody else moved first. Until somebody moved, the little countries of the Balkans, like those in the rest of Europe, sat, waited.
As war's shadow spread across Europe, its edge reached the Western Hemisphere (see p. 13). But most U. S. people who heard of its progress on their radios did not dare to imagine what, in mid-April 1940, it meant to be a European.