WESTERN THEATRE: Greatest Battle

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Men of middle age who saw what took place last week in Belgium and northern France said that it was more terrible to endure for two hours than all 299 days in 1915 when 278,000 Germans and 460,000 Frenchmen died on the blasted hilltops of Verdun. For this 1940 war was vertical as well as horizontal. To the old curtains of shell and rifle fire were added machine guns spitting from the sky, bombs bursting suddenly upon fields and highways, the unearthly roar of airplane motors drowning even the outcries of men. Fleets of land battleships crushed walls and swept the countryside. Cataracts of fire gushed from tanks advancing like moving walls.

Such war raged across 23,000 square miles of Europe. The explosion of men's nerves and brains became as commonplace as death and wounds. Casualties were impossible to assess in the flowing confusion. Four million men were engaged in the business of slaughter, their killing power multiplied by tens of thousands of slaughtering engines. Human morale could not long endure such war. Whoever best endured-and the strain was nearly as great on attackers as on defenders-must be the winner.

Strategy. Day by day at German Army Headquarters somewhere in the Rhineland last week, Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring and their commanding generals-von Brauchitsch, Keitel, Milch, Guderian-contemplated their operations map of Western Europe with profound satisfaction. Everything was working according to plan. Attack has always appealed to the German mind. And now they had such an attack! Their first push had already driven straight across Holland to Rotterdam. Before the Allied Armies rushing northward from the French border had time to reach prepared Belgian positions along the Albert Canal from Antwerp to Liége, a swift and fierce German drive cracked the Liége defenses the second day. *Headquarters watched the progress of German columns up the Meuse Valley towards Namur and westward towards Louvain.

If they heard at German headquarters that to counter this success Allied Generalissimo Maurice Gustave Gamelin rushed reserves to Namur from Sedan and Montmédy they doubtless shook hands with one another in elation. Soon their map recorded another push. In the rough and wooded Ardennes, German spearheads crushed the Belgian Chasseurs and drove straight at the Maginot Extension below Sedan. They made a dent, the dent was widened to a pocket. The pocket became a bulge when other columns crushed through: below Namur near Dinant, Givet, Mèziéres; above Namur at Gembloux. Flinging power behind power to the full extent of their resources. Hitler's generals watched their plans unfold.

The Schlieffen Plan, master design of Germany's attack in 1914, called for the German Armies swinging like a scythe pivoted from a point near Metz, to sweep in a wide circle through Belgium far to the westward around Paris and, still sweeping around, finally pin the French Armies against the Rhine and the Alps. Last week, they watched the execution of another plan, another swing, but a swing in the opposite direction. Pivoting at Antwerp, the scythe swept westward. Its point at Sedan swept onward to Rethel, Laon, St. Quentin. For a time it threatened to swing far enough south to take in Paris, but its surest aim as it swept on day by day was to pin the Allied Armies in Belgium back against the Channel.