WESTERN THEATRE: Battle of France

France's shoulders went back against the wall last week. No sooner had his Armies taken Dunkirk, consolidating his hold on the western coast of Europe "from the Arctic Circle to the north of the Somme," than Adolf Hitler hurled them southward against the remaining Armies of Allied Generalissimo Maxime Weygand along a 160-mile front stretching from Abbeville to Rethel (see map).

Into the first assault went 40 German divisions, each 15,000 strong. In addition there were seven armored divisions, each with 450 tanks and a brigade of mechanized infantry, plus artillery and motorcycle fleets. After four days of furious fighting, 40 fresh divisions of German infantry and hundreds more tanks had joined in. East of Rethel, which was pounded only by artillery at first, a massive infantry assault plunged this week into the Argonne Forest, while an armored prong on the west pushed forward at the battle's outset, reached and crossed the lower Seine south of Rouen. Clouds of parachute troops swarmed down on the plain of Champagne, south of Reims. As German operations developed, the Battle of France took its place as easily history's hugest and, for France, most terrible.

Her chance of surviving it appeared to be a.fcout one in five. In spite of the mag-nit' j and complexity of action. Generalissimo Weygand trained his guns calmly, recoiled only foot by foot, called upon his men to resist in the great French tradition.

Said he: "The future of France depends upon your tenacity. Hold tight to the soil of France. . . . Look only forward." People who saw him in action described him as going about his work methodically at a kitchen table in a whitewashed room of a cottage near the front. As the battle reached crescendo, he declared to his men: "The enemy has suffered considerable losses. Soon he will reach the end of his effort.

This is the last quarter-hour. Hold fast." Against 1,500,000 Germans who were engaged by week's end, Weygand had not more than 60 French divisions, plus perhaps two British, two or three Polish, perhaps one Belgian (last week being reorganized, re-uniformed)-about 1,000,000 men in all, to face an enemy whose reserves alone were that many. He dared not weaken further the garrisons of the Maginot Line or his ten divisions facing the new Italian enemy. The Germans, he prophesied, would extend their attack until it stretched all the way to Switzerland in order to keep him from concentrating his strength on any main front. Such was the grim situation, as the field grey forces and their blue-grey machines moved on, kilometre after kilometre, toward the Seine, the Marne and Paris.

To meet the Germans' mechanized attacks, which they launched first across the flat, marshy but (with Hitler's usual weather luck) now fairly dry lower Somme Valley at Abbeville, Amiens and Peronne.