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Europe's Stomach Muscles. Churchill's favorite strategy is long standing and well known. Ever since the time of Gallipoli he has favored getting at the beast through his "soft underbelly." Actually that underbelly is not soft now. By last week it had become apparent that victory in Tunisia, which probably must precede any invasion of southern Europe, might be delayed long enough—perhaps into June—to let the underbelly become much harder.
A correspondent of the Hungarian Pester Lloyd on a trip through Thrace reported last week that the frontier area was speckled with innumerable, brand-new bunkers. Minsker Zeitung, a German paper in Occupied Russia, featured stories about mighty new fortifications on the Aegean islands, including Crete. In Yugoslavia, the SS division Prinz Eugen was last week winding up a month's campaign in which it claimed to have recovered half of the Partisan-freed territory, including the capital, Bihac. The south of France was being additionally fortified.
The Risk of Spain. In order to deny the Allies free communications through the Mediterranean, Germany must keep positions in Africa close to opposite positions in Europe. Tunisia and Sicily afford such positions. Gibraltar and Spanish Morocco could also afford them, and Spain itself could close the narrow way from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean.
Last week a sudden spurt of activity in and near Spain focused the world's attention there. Most of the activity was political, but 400 German troop trains were reported to have moved recently toward France's Spanish border. Eleven divisions were said to be massed on the Mediterranean end of the frontier. Germany closed the border area as a military zone.
But these preparations may have been solely defensive. Occupation of Spain by Hitler would entail a heavy risk. The adventure would probably require 25 divisions. The Iberian Peninsula would earn Hitler some 1,800 miles of vulnerable coastline. Since most Spanish railways are broad gauge and already taxed for internal needs, it would give Hitler a logistical headache. But above all, it would disperse his forces to duplicate a job already being done at the Tunisia-Sicily bottleneck.
Audacity or Smoke Screen? A report from Le Havre to the Swiss Tribune de Genève last week said that German reconnaissance over England had led to this conclusion: "We are on the eve of an English attempt of unsuspected audacity." Considering the source and the channels, this message could mean one of two opposites: 1) the British were preparing an invasion force; 2) they or the Germans were setting up a smoke screen. Either could be true.
Germans fear an Allied blow at Norway. A German military writer, retired Rear Admiral Richard Gadow—the first German to disclose, in 1935, that the Nazis were building submarines—wrote recently in Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung: "A successful Allied invasion of Norway would be a catastrophe for Germany. Norway in the hands of the enemy would mean great economy in the protection of Anglo-Saxon convoys . . . and would constitute a dangerous threat to the Finnish northern flank"—to say nothing, eventually, of the German northern flank.