After Dunkirk

Great Britain's eloquent Prime Minister Winston Churchill, last week in a fighting speech to Parliament (for its text see p. 26), admitted British losses of "over 30,000" men killed, wounded & missing, nearly 1,000 guns "and all our transport and all the armored vehicles that were with the Army of the North." But he said that the Royal Navy, "using nearly 1,000 ships of all kinds, carried over 335,000 men, French and British, from the jaws of death."

He concluded: "We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. . . ."

But last week was certainly not the Allies' hour. Though two French divisions and one British fought bravely to the end at Dunkirk, and Vice Admiral Jean Marie Charles Abrial of the French Navy jauntily puffed his pipe and stayed ashore until the last launch, the hour was Adolf Hitler's and he made the most of it.

He had himself photographed in front of the majestic Canadian War Memorial at Vimy Ridge, thus proving that his bombers had not wrecked it. And from his headquarters issued triumphant messages to his soldiers and his people. Excerpts:

"The greatest military achievement of all times was accomplished when Germany, after a surprisingly short time [eleven days], was able to establish main battle fronts along the Rivers Aisne and Somme. . . .

"This unprecedented German achievement constitutes simultaneously the greatest military defeat that any military forces ever suffered. A great many lives may have been saved by 'tie British naval forces, but the booty captured is so enormous that no estimate can yet be given. ..." The German High Command claimed 1,200,000 French, English, Belgian and Dutch casualties and prisoners. It claimed seizing or destroying weapons and materiel for 75 divisions. It claimed destruction of 3,500 enemy a; Dianes, sinking of 24 warships and 66 tiisports, damages to 59 warships, 117 transports.

From May 10 to June 1, German casualties were set by the Germans at the fantastically low figure of 10,255 officers and men killed,-8,643 missing, 42,523 wounded. Germany's admitted airplane losses: 432.

To celebrate his victory, Fuhrer Hitler ordered flags flown throughout Germany for eight days, bells rung for three. As his war machine swung from Flanders into action on the Somme-Aisne line, he declared :

"Inasmuch as the enemy still spurns peace, the fight will be carried on to his total destruction."

U. S. correspondents who were taken along by the Germans in their pursuit of the Allies to the sea repeatedly expressed amazement at the Hitler machine's fitness and efficiency. They saw windrows of Allied but few German corpses, the German system being to bury their dead within an hour for reasons of morale as well as hygiene. Even before Dunkirk's final fall, masses of German troops began moving to the new southern front. German mechanics drove back long lines of abandoned Allied motor trucks, camouflaging them with their own blue-grey paint, loading them with salvaged parts such as batteries, tires, spark plugs or with captured gasoline and other supplies. German engineers were already at work reconditioning the captured Channel ports (but the British, after two tries, effectively blocked Zeebrugge with four ships full of concrete).

Reported by U. S. correspondents were some fine points of Nazi technique: > In bombing enemy columns, German pilots aimed their missiles at the roadsides, whence their fragmentation was just as devastating, rather than blowing holes in the road surface, which might impede pursuing German columns. Similarly, in razed towns, whole blocks of houses were destroyed without damage to the streets.

>Cultivated fields, in which harvests will soon be ripe for the German conquerors, were virtually unscathed by bombing or artillery fire.

>German officers called the stench of death "the perfume of battle.

* Official German figure for the Polish campaign was 10,572 German officers and men killed-317 more than admitted in fighting the combined Allies.

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