WESTERN THEATRE Side Door
Scores, hundreds, thousands of French, British, Germans—seasoned survivors of World War I as well as fresh-faced fodder for World War II— suffered painful, personal wounds or death along the Perl-to-Lauterbourg front last week. So did hundreds of pigs which the French Infantry drove before them to locate and detonate concealed land mines. Yet B. Mussolini was not unduly cynical when he said: "Europe is not yet actually at war. The masses of the armies have not yet clashed" (see p. 22).
For it was true that, hideous though local scenes were—a shell lighting on the crew of a pillbox, a riddled fighting plane screeching to its crash, a forest suddenly illuminated at night by roaring red dynamite, a man crawling back through the grass to an aid station—they were as nothing compared to what could & would take place when one side or other turned loose its full offensive power. When & where that offensive would come remained inscrutable at the end of the war's third week, but major stirrings and preparations, monstrous massing of men on both sides, boded cataclysm soon.
The British War Secretary, Leslie Hore-Belisha, made a quick trip to Paris. Two days later the French members of the Supreme War Council, Premier Edouard Daladier and Generalissimo Maurice Gustave Gamelin, accompanied by several aides, flew secretly to England and met "somewhere in Sussex," in a quiet town hall, with their British colleagues. Munitions and food supply were said to have been the chief agenda. French mobilization was announced as having been finally completed (after 17 days of war), with 3,500,000 men under arms in a zone 15 to 30 miles deep behind the Maginot Line. Artillery pounding, mostly by night to escape the eyes of aviation, grew heavier and heavier. Also heavier grew the atmosphere of suspense as the Allies watched corresponding mobilization behind the Westwall.
The German Commander-in-Chief, Colonel General Walther von Brauchitsch, was reported to have arrived from Poland on the Western Front, with headquarters at Bingen.* The No. 4 Nazi, Rudolf Hess, was reported making a tour of the entire Westwall. The chief of the Nazi labor battalions, Robert Ley, was known to be here & there behind the Wall, driving his men to complete and strengthen the fortifications behind which Germany was preparing either a permanent stand or a counteroffensive the nature of which was darkly dramatized by A. Hitler's reference in Danzig to "a weapon with which we cannot be attacked" (see p. 50).
Of deepest concern to the Allies were German activities on the upper reaches of their Westwall. As far north as Wesel and Emmerich, where the Rhine turns west to enter the Netherlands, workers were observed completing casemates and tank traps opposite the neutral Dutch soil. Why? Near Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) just across the border from the Limburg point which runs down between Germany and Belgium, heavy concentrations of Nazi airplanes were reported, and heavy new concentrations of ground troops, apparently brought over from the Polish front. Why?