CORRESPONDENTS' VIEWS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 247, 18 October 1941, Page 6

CORRESPONDENTS' VIEWS

1812 (To the Editor) J.M., in writing of the situation, is under the that Napoleon's objective wm £ capture Moscow. This wag my Jil Napoleon's one and only atm destroy the Russian armies, and *£" this he failed signally. Fhn tfe opening of the campaign tin summer) till reaching Moscow lost 135.000 men through t»" famine, disease and desertions »W These losses were entirely in tion to those incurred at Borodina (a positive massacre/wE* 78,000 fell) and other points. KakamM soon made a strategic retreat towanfc Moscow with Napoleon not tooJat in pursuit, but instead of findbwfte - Russians making a stand betas Moscow, as Napoleon expecM. Kutosoff's army just wasnt'thM The French entered the capital f opposed. It was at this stace thK the great conqueror of ISams ~ uttered his pathetic bleats to iR - world at large, and to Czar Alexander in particular, about the plight Europe was now in, not. be it due to the depredations of the RreWk Army, but to the "stranglehold inflicted by the sea power of that peri fidious race of islanders, the British!" Since Napoleon's army tad no one to fight near Moscow, without sufficient food and shelter, he had no alternative but to retreat, and it was at this stage where the traditional Russian policy of ham-string. ing the enemy b sea me so effective. Kutosoff, in his retreat, had mesawhile been gaining more and more recruits to his army, to such an extent that Napoleon was scarcely in a position to face him. The loam inflicted by this fresh and augmented army were appalling; Napoleon, with his miserable remnant army, vat glad to quit the soil of Russia, and it was not till now that Alexander even acknowledged Napoleon's peace proposals, in the only way the Garsican really understood, hy the sword. The rest is well known. P. ENGLAND.