Soar Push

The chiefs of the Allied Armies, Generalissimo Maurice Gustave Gamelin and towering (6 ft. 4 in.) General Sir Edmund ("Tiny") Ironside, came together with their staffs on French soil last week. The English Channel was closed south of the Downs by a minefield. Across it into France, General Sir Edmund delivered some 100,000 British troops to the land forces operating under General Gamelin's supreme command. At the same time the air chiefs met, Sir Cyril L. N. Newall and General Joseph Vuillemin. In the air the Briton is the boss, but in this War, land and air forces are integrated more closely than ever before. All the generals concentrated on a problem for which neither nation had primarily fashioned its arms: an offensive action moving away from France's great defensive bastion, the Maginot Line.

Scene. Having the initiative was their fundamental advantage and General Gam elin moved cautiously to retain it. The sector he chose for his first move against Germany's "impregnable" Westwall (or Limes Line*) was the 100-mi, stretch from Lauterbourg on the Rhine, northwest to the Moselle River (see map). Here the German border and the Westwall guarding it depart from the Rhine, to run across hilly vineyard and forest country. To break through the Wall here does not involve the added difficulty of crossing the Rhine. And neutral Luxembourg guards the French left flank. Last week the lower reaches of the Maginot Line and Westwall, facing each other across the Rhine from Lauterbourg south to the Swiss border, lay quiet except for occasional, experimental artillery exchanges. Soldiers of both armies were reported bathing on their respective sides of the river, in full view of each other. Signs on the German side said: "We have orders not to fire on you until you fire on us."

Tactics. Terse communiques from the French War Ministry grew increasingly informative as the week's action developed in the Saar sector. Between the massive, deep networks of the Westwall proper and the international boundary, were not only forests of trees, but forests of pill boxes and blockhouses (called "Bunkers" by the Germans), bristling with machine guns and connected by deep trenches with the main fortifications behind. The machine guns were so placed that every foot of passable terrain was swept by two or more death-spitting muzzles. First task of the French was to feel out these defenses by aerial photography and by scouting parties on foot and horseback, debouching from the Maginot Line.

As they were located, each pill box, block house, tank trap or tank obstruction was shelled, then rushed by light tanks and infantry. One after one they were destroyed, the beleaguered German advance squads often blowing them up before scuttling back to their heavy forts. Behind them they left land mines which, when the French artillery did not find them in time blew up the advancing tanks. Also encountered were robot machine guns, operated electrically by remote control. Swarming through the Warndt Forest between Saarbruecken and Saarlautern, the French found the woods "full of destruction and traps of all kinds." But by week's end that forest and the Bienwald farther east was theirs. Several Moroccan regiments and at least one British division were said to be in the Saar advance. The fighting got down to bayonets.

As infiltration forces found the way, France's 70-ton "rolling fortresses" next trundled forth, followed by more infantry. Main function of these monsters, hurling 3-in. shells, is to wipe out all remaining "pockets" of resistance and ultimately carry the attack to the main defenses.

During the week, these units were reported active in the surroundings of Saarbrucken, the capture of some 200 sq. mi. including part of the right bank of the strategic Saar River (tributary of the Moselle), but they did not yet go up against the firm ramparts of the Westwall. It was unlikely they would do so before the French artillery--ponderous 155-mm. howitzers lobbing shells from far behind; flat-shooting 755 moving up into the cleared area--have pounded at the Wall forts for many days. The concrete fortresses of the Maginot Line are 150 ft. deep in some places and hard as flint. French hope was that the Westwall concrete, poured more hastily, can be pulverized by France's really heavy artillery (400-500 mm.).

Strategy of General Gamelin's push in the Saar was to draw German troops from the Eastern Theatre to meet a threatened grand attack--or he was shrewdly waiting for the Germans to get even further into Poland before turning on the real heat. Just as France's main Maginot Line is manned by veteran regulars, with young reservists performing the attack work, so Germany's Wall is manned by 20 divisions (some 250,000 men) of the regular Land--wehr, mostly veterans of 35-45, specially trained for defense. For sallies and counterattack which the Germans executed with moderate success last week, less valuable field troops are used, and Allied observers reported streams of reinforcements flowing toward Trier at week's end. They looked like about six divisions, which would be no great diversion from the 70 (out of Germany's total of over 100 divisions) known to be on the Polish Front. All week official Berlin continued to pretend that all was quiet on the Western Front, at week's end scornfully admitting "occasional little exchanges." The French reported a German counteroffensive taking shape in front of Trier, aimed at a key part of the Maginot Line in Sierk, north of Metz. This was designed to reduce the pressure of the French drive toward Neunkirchen. Should the fighting swing west from there, it would likely level the home of Hitler's roving Ambassador, Franz von Papen.

Thrift & Caution. In World War I, it was a month before news correspondents were taken to the fighting front. The scantiness of news from the Western Front last week caused some people to ask if the Allies were only "shadow boxing." Reply to that was that preparation of a major push against such defense works as the Westwall is a matter of many days, not hours. Infantry is still counted by the French as the basic measure of fighting power: men on foot in combat groups of ten, each group armed with a light machine gun. They are sent out, not in dense waves as the British were sent so disastrously in the Somme, but in small scattered bands worming their way ahead.

The basic French combat groups are husbanded with peasant thriftiness and caution. Attacks are as carefully planned as cabbage rows, reserves hoarded like the manure pile in the farmyard. Two other tenets scrupulously observed by the French make for slowness of action: always to keep the reserves of all arms behind any attack double the strength of the actual attackers; to carry no phase of an attack beyond its point of maximum momentum. Thus, when advancing troops last week encountered a particularly stubborn "Bunker," they paused until the artillery or a flanking party cleared the way.

The Gamelin drive last week captured rich Saar coal lands which France lost in the plebiscite of 1935. (The Germans counterattacked by moving troops up through old coal galleries, which both sides began dynamiting and sealing for self-protection.) It was aimed at what has been guessed to be one of the few vulnerable spots in the Westwall. But it,was not necessarily the major push in the Allied plan to break through. Frantic efforts to strengthen defenses at their Wall's south end betokened the Germans' fear that a main drive might come there, through the Burgundy Gate. Through the Black Forest, across lower Germany and what used to be Czechoslovakia, is a short route from France to Poland. And in Czecho-Slovakia, A. Hitler's hold on the people is lightest. While watching the Saar push this week, neutral observers listened also for the opening of a major blast in the South.

*"Limes Line" is redundant. Limes (lee-mez) is a singular Latin noun which means "limit" or "boundary." The Limes Germanicus of Roman days was a wall running from Bonn on the Rhine to Regensburg on the Danube. Limes Britannicas shut out the little blue Picts of Britain from the Roman province there, is better known as Hadrian's Wall. The term Siegfried Line applies to all the fortifications built by the Nazis around Germany's whole perimeter. Westwall is the part facing France.

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