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." Fuehrer 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-Magurele 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.

Monster Grunts. Soviet Russia, vapid monster in the East, emitted troubled grunts but nothing more. Four times her minister in Bucharest called at the Foreign Office to protest. First against the "atti tude, of the Rumanian press," then the "campaign labeling all Rumanian criminals as Communists," then the "general unfriendly Rumanian attitude." On his fourth visit he demanded that impotent Rumania explain the presence of the in creasing Nazi hordes and give an immediate answer to his other protests. Reports that 30 crack Soviet divisions had ar rived in Bessarabia to counter Hitler's Army, and that the region of Odessa was under martial law, sent Rumanians from the Moldavian borderland fleeing into the interior. Jews, attempting to flee maraud ing Iron Guardists, were for the first time turned back when they tried to enter Soviet territory.

Gauleiter Arrives. With grim significance, German sources intimated that Rumania was unable to govern herself, that the time was at hand for the Nazis to assume complete military and political control.

It was perhaps for this purpose that Hitler replaced his scholarly ambassador in Bucharest, Dr. Wilhelm Fabricius, with a brash terrorist, Baron Manfred von Killinger, whose record is one of the bloodiest in Nazidom's unsavory history. Active since 1920 as a plotter, gunman, Putschist and purger, he served briefly as Consul General in San Francisco, scored impressive success in reducing Slovakia to submission. As Gauleiter of Rumania, the Baron could be expected to exhibit those arts of discipline for which he is notorious.

King Defies. Bulgaria, vital pawn in the giants' chess game, entered an uneasy new year. King Boris III, who prefers his English cousins any day to his Hohenzollern relatives, had told Adolf Hitler at Berlin that, rather than see German troops in his peasant kingdom, he would abdicate. Last Week he retired 27 high Army officers who had demanded that Bulgaria join the Axis and, in a stormy session of the Sobranje, Premier Bogdan Filoff silenced pro-Nazi deputies with a defiant "No foreign regimes for Bulgaria." With the arrival of the first Nazi units at the frontier, Bulgarian resolution seemed less firm, and foreign observers believed that under pressure the Government might concede the "futility" of armed resistance. Significantly enough, the Bulgarian Army was reported concentrated on the Turkish border.

Luftwaffe Ignites. While the Nazis' other plans matured, whatever they were, at week's end the Luftwaffe returned to its central task with a freshly furious fire-raid on London. A few hours before Franklin Roosevelt's more-aid-to-Britain speech, hundreds of huge blazes severely taxed the courage of London's thousands of firemen and thousands of volunteers. The Guildhall and other ancient monuments in The City went down in avalanches and up in flames--the worst fire in that part of London since 1666. And elsewhere in the capital the forces of Commander Aylmer Newton George Fire-brace, head of London's firefighters, who had just left on a trip of inspection and instruction through the less well-equipped provincial cities, found themselves faced with the most dangerous conflagrations in modern history--and London's water pressure was low.

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