The Ramparts

The gabled Chateau Henri IV in the Forest of Fontainebleau near Paris, once the summer home of French kings, lay hollow and still over the Easter weekend. Outside, a group of British Tommies in shirtsleeves played soccer. Inside, in the dank, cobwebbed rooms, only one officer could be accounted for; he was sweating over a regimental payroll.

This was the military headquarters of Western Europe. Its head man, Britain's Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, was the commander in chief of the military forces of the five West European nations who (in the Brussels pact last year) had decided to stand together against aggression. It would in all likelihood serve as the nucleus of the GHQ of the North Atlantic nations' joint forces.

In many ways, Fontainebleau functioned like a real headquarters. Its brisk brass was efficiently sectioned off into Unilion (Montgomery's central command), Uniterre (land command under French General de Lattre de Tassigny), Unimer (sea command under French Vice Admiral Jaujard), and Uniair (air command under Britain's Air Marshal Sir James Robb). The only trouble was that their forces were mostly shadow forces.

The North Atlantic Treaty had given the democracies a new sense of unity, and implicit assurance that the U.S. meant to go to war if the Red army tried to invade Western Europe; but the treaty, by the very fact that it also committed Western Europe to stand against aggression, had thrown into sharp and shocking relief

Western Europe's military weakness. The hard fact was that Western Europe's ramparts at the Eastertide were incapable of even slowing any aggressive thrust to the Channel and the Atlantic coast.

Wooden Guns. Exact figures on Europe's military establishment were technically secret. But it was no secret to anyone that the Western European powers between them could put no more than a dozen poorly equipped, poorly organized combat divisions into the field, virtually bare of armor and effective air support.

According to the best available figures, France had 550,000 men in uniform, spread over her own country, her zones in

Germany and Austria, and the overseas territories, including war-torn Indo-China. Stern, tireless General de Lattre de Tassigny had struggled hard to reorganize the French army and instill into it a new self-respect. The fact remained that at home it still trained with wooden guns and that even with overseas forces it could put in the field only five to nine ill-equipped combat divisions. France had about 1,000 planes, all of them worthless for combat service.

In Belgium and The Netherlands, the total of men in arms was around 260,000, who might at best make up five combat divisions. Of these, 150,000 men were committed in Indonesia. Holland had two fighter squadrons (also in Indonesia), and Belgium had five.

Britain had some 550,000 men under arms, most of them still in training but fairly well equipped. They were scattered, however, from Aldershot to Kuala Lumpur. By next year, London expects to have 347,000 men in the British Isles and continental Europe alone. As for immediately available combat divisions, most guesses were that the United Kingdom had two. The Royal Air Force was relatively strong, with an estimated 6,000 planes.

Norway, Denmark, Portugal and Italy added perhaps another 350,000 ill-trained men to the total. Against Western European force, Russia maintained an estimated 165 combat divisions in a high state of training and preparedness. Some two dozen of these were stationed in Germany.

Counterpart to ERP. U.S. military men believe that 35 to 40 Western European divisions, adequately equipped and with adequate air support, would have a fair chance of holding a line--possibly the Rhine--against the Red army. They also estimate that to raise Western Europe's military establishment to that minimum strength, even with ample U.S. aid, would take from three to five years.

This month Congress will receive President Truman's request for authority to arm Europe's free nations. The cost is estimated at $1.8 billion for the first year alone. The measure faces heavy opposition. The chief argument against it runs something like this: if the Russians are led to believe that U.S. assistance will make Western Europe harder & harder to conquer during the next five years, they will be tempted to attack right now, while the attacking is good.

Proponents of military aid to Western Europe hold that it is not yet primarily a military question; it is a question of politics, psychology and faith. If the U.S. considered war imminent or inevitable, a case could be made for keeping all arms and resources at home. But so long as the U.S. believes that war can be avoided, through strengthening the world's free peoples and thereby containing communism, the U.S. has to recognize that ERP needs its military counterpart. Western Europe, proponents argue, needs the feeling that, until U.S. armies come to its aid, it can make its own stand.

Contrapuntal Coos. Last week, as for weeks past, the French Communists were straining every nerve to block Western Europe's rearmament. They were peddling the line that even though the U.S. signed the Atlantic Treaty, it would not send arms, would fight only to the last French civilian. The Communists supplemented the line by contrapuntal coos to the effect that war was not necessary, anyway, if only Russia got her peace-loving way. To support this siren song, the Reds were assembling a world peace congress in Paris this week, a bigger and better counterpart of the propaganda shindig recently held in Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria. They plastered the walls of Paris with the dove of peace which Pablo Picasso had designed to advertise the congress.

By & large, Frenchmen knew that the Communists' dove was a phony bird. But it was also an ominous threat, fluttering over weary people who, if they lost confidence in the U.S., might feel like settling for peace at any price. Cracked one boulevard flaneur: "C'est une colombe de Troie"--a Trojan dove.

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