NAZI STRATEGY

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 187, 9 August 1941, Page 6

NAZI STRATEGY

HELD OFF UKRAINE TOLL BY RUSSIANS FORECAST OF LONG WAR ! (By COL. FREDERICK PALMER) WASHINGTON, July 1 Has it been going as well as | they anticipated for the Germans in their invasion of Russia? If not, what chance has Russia to hold out? Let us assay some apparently dependable realities out of the conflict of reports, propaganda and soothsayers' predictions. At the outset we heard talk that the Germans would win a final victory in a month coupled with the forecast they would be in for a long war if they did not. On this basis they have three weeks to go to escape the long war. The prophets of swift German success were under the spell of German military prestige. The German Army had conquered the first-class French Army in six weeks. Why shouldn't it conquer the Russian Army, which was rated somewhere between the third and fifth class, in four weeks? However, it is a safe bet that the German High Command did not itself set the limit as one month. That is, the High Command did not unless it was so blown up with a sense of cosmic martial superiority as to be oblivious to one of the first principles of war, which is that you never know what surprise even an inferior enemy may spring upon I you. • Flank Attack on Ukraine I One fact of which we can be sure | is that the Germans have a town j when they say they have it and the Russians admit its loss. Point to point this gives us the positions of the armies. It has revealed the strategy of the campaign. Wonder has been expressed as to how very simple the strategy is in its outline. Strategy is always simple, a matter of flanking, penetration, encirclement, the rupture of communications, whether over a front 20 or 2000 miles long. The list I have of books which German officers are bidden to study of course includes the great basic three-volume work of von Clausewitz. He sums up by saying that strategy is common sense. Confederate General Forrest said strategy is getting there first with the most men, by which he meant, of course, at a critical, decisive point. The Germans have been getting ; there at the critical points with the j most striking power, if not the most men. In the north their aim is to blast the Russians out of their Arctic 1 seaport of Murmansk and out of their '' Baltic ports and naval bases, making the Baltic a German lake. In what was relatively the centre . of their line they would definitely [ overwhelm the Russian armies based . on Moscow. Meanwhile the German- j ' Rumanian armies in the south > would mark time opposite the ; Ukraine until they had tne word to > go, when the central German force 1 was ready to strike at the Ukraine in . flank. ' In the central drive toward Mos- - cow the Germans had to cross ' Russian-occupied Poland before 1 reaching Russia proper. This took. ' time and should have enabled the ' Russians to take toll before falling - back to the so-called Stalin Line. j Fanaticism Yersns Fanaticism ; How much toll have the Russians - been taking? How much in bloodletting and destruction of material have they made the Germans pay for every mile won? There's one vital - j factor in their ability to hold out in -; a long war. Here is another still 5j more important: the Germans report t! that the Russians are fighting with - desperate courage, but without sense 5 and understanding. Thev have • always fought valorously. thev did JI even when armed with clubs' and f j without guns and on starvation 3 rations, as the pawns of stupid direc--1 tion and disorganisation in the World r j War. : } It is not unlikely that the Ger- • | mans, galvanised into a fanatic spirit ! by the Fuehrer, are finding that the f j Russian youth as worshippers of t! Lenin have been galvanised into an rj equivalent spirit in resistance. In a . people used to bloody revolution and - close gambles between life and death s! there are immense possibilities in an f i immense stretch of countrv for guer-L-1 ilia warfare.

It poems safe to conclude that the German advance will continue: that the Russians are taking heavier toll than the Germans anticipated- and that, although their armies are broken, the Russians will still he able to give the Germans the worst task in mopping up thev have had vet in their succession of sensational victories. The real triumph of German strategy was in not striking fir«t for the grain fields and oil of the Ukraine, which is the old goal of German ambition. Thus Russia's best army, established there for the I kraine defence, is temporarilv lneffective.—"Auckland Star" and N .A.N. A.