Word: dakar
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...last week Vichy's loud pretense that there are no Nazis at Dakar had been blown higher than an ack-ack barrage. Home from Africa, huge New York Herald Tribune Correspondent Hiram Blauvelt reported that the Nazis, operating from Dakar, had won a smashing victory in the Battle of the Atlantic...
...months the chief West African port of call for British supply ships was the great harbor of Freetown, 570 miles southeast of Dakar. There the ships were gathered into convoys for the rest of the journey to Britain. Nazi submarines slinking out from Dakar sank so much British shipping around Freetown that convoying through the port was ended early in July. With the waters off West Africa no longer safe, supply ships now have to swing far out into the Atlantic, take weeks longer to reach Britain...
Unkindest Cut. At the State Department last week Judge Hull reportedly gave Vichy's man a stern lecture, warned him that France must send no aid to Germany if she wants sympathy from the U.S. Specifically, Vichy was told not to let the Nazis move into Dakar. But if the U.S. decides it must take over Martinique, the French will be expected to surrender the island without resistance. (If they should resist, the U.S. will probably just ring the island with cruisers, wait for the French to surrender, without wasting either American or Vichyfrench lives in an attack...
...this made everybody but the Germans very happy. It pleased Britain, whose forces would get more U.S. planes quicker, whose ferry pilots would be released for combat. It pleased the U.S., which would achieve a preliminary security by getting air bases flanking Dakar. It pleased Pan Am, which now needed only a Cairo-to-Singapore link to have the basis of the sole round-the-world postwar airline...
...week France rang with rumors, mostly inspired, that Germany had called for a showdown with Vichy, had given Marshal Petain the hard choice of complete collaboration-including surrender of bases in Dakar and French North Africa-or complete subjugation...