New Front?

Once again Adolf Hitler was busy in Norway. All ports from the North Cape down to Alesund were tightly sealed. Across the Skagerrak, by ship and plane, streamed reinforcements for Nazi garrisons. Strung out along the thawing fjords were almost 200,000 troops, double the number that guarded Norway last fall. The powerful battleship Tirpitz, which recently weathered a British torpedo-plane attack, lay under the sheltering guns of Trondheim Fjord. With her were the 10,000-ton pocket battleship Admiral Scheer, the 10,000-ton heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. Were the Nazis about to move against Britain's supply lines to Russia's Arctic ports? Or were they plotting a foray against U.S.-held Iceland?

London speculated upon both possibilities, and on still another. Perhaps the Nazis were simply getting set to ward off any Allied attempt on Norway. Although the Nazis have fortified key points from Trondheim south, northern Norway is far from impregnable. Last week, while Nazi Munitions Minister Albert Speer, successor to the late Masterbuilder Major General Fritz Todt (TIME, Feb. 16), sped work on defenses to the north, the Norwegians were tripping and clipping him with sabotage. One highly effective means was the touching off of fires in plants housing vital Nazi war industries.

With hatred of the Nazis seething through Norway, with Canadian and U.S. expeditionary forces on hand in Britain, Norway looked inviting as a diversion theater, to distract the Germans from other fronts, if not yet as the Allied road back. A sweep across northern Norway would give the Allies a common U.S.-British-Soviet front, might knock Finland out of the war. Joseph Stalin is anxious to get his allies into some nearby field, even if their foray fails. The mere threat of action against Norway had already immobilized some 200,000 German soldiers who might have been killing Russians.

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