Mist & Mystery

Heavy mists hung over northwest Europe last week and so did heavy suspense. A Christmas "truce" was observed by the Luftwaffe, but the quiet was ominous. The most terrific military force in the world, the German Army, had been idle for six months and on Christmas Eve its commander, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, visited its westernmost camps on the Channel coast. At Cap Gris Nez, near the long-range guns which sporadically hurl shells into England, he told his men: "The Channel will protect England only so long as it suits us." Führer Hitler was also at the Western Front during the holiday lull, exhorting his troops and talking darkly about mighty efforts to come.

The British Army and Royal Air Force took no chances. As soon as the Christmas truce was over, Germany's "invasion ports" were thunderously plastered with bombs night after night, from Norway to lower France.

600,000 Southeast. While it was quiet in the northwest, the German Army was definitely on the move in the southeast. Men and materiel moved in great numbers over the State railways of Hungary, from which German control officers barred al most all civilian traffic. As many as 25 trains a day rolled into Rumania, long strings of flat cars loaded with every kind of tank and cannon, up to heaviest siege ordnance. Box cars by the hundreds with seals on the doors rolled too, containing —some estimators said — enough soldiers to bring Hitler's strength in the Balkans up to 600,000. These troops began appearing and settling themselves in camps along the ice-filled Danube's left bank.

At Timisoara, just 20 miles from the Yugoslav frontier, a mechanized division took up quarters. Mechanized units set tled down for the winter at Turnu-Māgurele near the Bulgarian border, his toric jumping-off-place of the barbaric hordes who in past ages surged through the Rhodope Mountain passes into the fertile plains of Grecian Thrace. Across the Danube and two-and-one-half miles of marshland that separate Rumanian Giurgiu from Bulgarian Russe, Nazi engineers began to construct a gigantic ferry and pontoon bridge capable of supporting the heaviest equipment.

Perhaps Supreme Warlord Hitler in tended to use his Balkan Army for a thrust into Greece whose Army was still pushing at the Italians last week, or at least as a diversion to pull away British forces pounding the Italians in Libya. Perhaps it was to be used against Turkey or as insurance against Soviet ambitions during an all out battle in the West. Supreme Warlord Hitler gave no indication, and suspension of all except official communications from Rumania left the whereabouts of the major body of his troops unknown.