BRITISH TROOPS MARCH INTO DERNA. First Bardia, then Tobruk -- and now Derna. British armies in North Africa under General Wavell’s command have now advanced westward over 175 miles from the Egyptian border, seized three major Fascist bastions, and now threaten Italian control over all of eastern Libya. According to an Associated Press dispatch, the Italians tried to defend Derna with fewer than 10,000 troops, and now are trying to "organize a new line behind it in a final attempt to halt the British drive and save Bengasi, 150 miles to the west." Mussolini is also facing a new round of bad news in Italian East Africa, where a new British thrust into Eritrea by tank and armored car units has trapped about 30,000 Italian troops. And a radio report this morning says Greek forces have completely encircled over 15,000 Italians in the Albanian town of Tempelini, and also anticipate taking the port of Valona momentarily.
What’s most interesting about these latest Italian disasters is that the Fascist armies involved aren’t disorganized, ill-trained, or retreating pell-mell. They appear to be well-disciplined and are putting up a tough fight. The A.P. reports the defenders of Derna held out for four days, after giving "the most bitter resistance offered by the Fascists in the whole of the African campaign." The latest Greek victories come after the Duce’s troops have largely stalemated any further Greek advances in recent weeks, via numerous, and fierce, counter-attacks. If indeed the Italians are now putting up the best fight they possibly can, and they’re still getting whipped on three different fronts -- then, minus a massive German intervention, how much longer can we expect any Italian troops to be fighting outside of Italy? I’d say not past late Spring.
HITLER REFUTES THE ISOLATIONISTS. Administration spokesmen have debated the nation’s leading isolationists now for month after windy month about the European war. But nobody has refuted one central tenet of the isolationists more effectively than Hitler himself, according to a New York Herald Tribune editorial published yesterday --
"Somehow, Herr Hitler managed to convey, after all the absurd rodomontade and windy mindlessness of his Sports Palace speech, at least one concrete idea. He is going to destroy Britain. 'Wherever we can defeat England, we will defeat her.' The Fuehrer is too illiterate to get it into any more precisely quotable words; but he makes it evident enough that he has failed to absorb the more ingenious reasoning of people like Col. Lindbergh or Senators Wheeler or La Follette, who are so convinced that the war must end in a stalemate and a negotiated peace in which 'nobody wins.' The Fuehrer, with his more primitive intelligence, is certain only that he has got to win, or be destroyed; and the whole tenor of his speech was directed toward convincing the unhappy German people he is going to smash Britain, completely and finally, ‘within the year,’if he wrecks Germany in the attempt."
The editors find that Hitler’s words leave us but two possible worlds in the future, and Americans better be aware of that choice now -- "This ought, at least, to clear the atmosphere. It ought to close the mouths of those among the Fuehrer’s American aids and admirers who are bemusing themselves with pretty pictures of a future in which the war ends in a tie, in which Germany and Britain negotiate a peace leaving each more or less as we now know them, and the United States can go on untroubled in a world not essentially different from that to which we have become accustomed. The Fuehrer makes it perfectly plain that the actual prospect before us a far grimmer one than that. Either Nazi Germany is beaten -- beaten down decisively and finally -- or the British Commonwealth is destroyed. And destroyed, in the Hitler imagination, means 'destroyed' -- demolished, partitioned, its fleet sunk or captured, its economic resources put as completely at the Nazis’ disposal as are those of occupied France today. If the United States is not willing to work for the first alternative, the second is the one which actually faces it."
WHY HITLER GAVE THE SPEECH. Barnet Nover of the Washington Post thinks the Hitler speech came in response to a festering morale problem within the Reich --
"The German people must have asking themselves a lot of questions these days. They must be wondering why the spectacular victories of last year did not produce that final triumph which Nazi spokesmen and the Nazi press had repeatedly declared was just around the corner. They are certainly not unaware of what has been happening to Germany’s ally, Italy. The German press had played up the British evacuation of Berbera as the beginning of the end of the British Empire in Africa, the Italian capture of Sidi Barrani as proof that the fall of Suez was not fall off. No amount of praise of Italian heroism can delude Germans into believing that the [British] capture of Sidi Barrani, Sollum, Bardia, Trobruk, and Derna are Axis triumphs. The German people have furthermore been told, and told repeatedly, that London is in ruins, that Goering’s Luftwaffe commands the air over Britain, that British industry is in a desperate state. Yet the nightly visitations of R.A.F. bombers give the lie to this oft-told tale of British weakness. And the censorship has not been able to keep from Germans the news that the United States is on its way to becoming in a very real sense the ‘arsenal of the democracies.’ Those Germans who lived through the first World War are under no illusions as to what this may mean to the Reich."
The fact that Hitler sought to address those worries in the manner that did, writes Mr. Nover, is another indication of something big coming soon -- "Hitler’s speech was primarily an attempt to answer those questions, resolve those doubts, replace the growing German skepticism regarding the promised victory by renewed belief in the certainty of a German triumph....The very circumstance that Hitler has found it necessary to bolster Germany’s morale, hold out the promise of a victory this year suggests that he is likely very soon to throw everything Germany has into the scales in order to win such a decision in that time. For Germany to wait would be fatal to Hitler’s chances of victory by increasing the strength of his enemies abroad, by multiplying the number of doubters at home. Hitler’s Sportspalast speech is additional proof that the hour of decision draws near."
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