THE TRIPLE SQUEEZE

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 76, 31 March 1945, Page 4

THE TRIPLE SQUEEZE

TJITLER had much to say of "encirclement" when he launched his * campaign for the enslavement of Europe. He is getting it now. One front at a time was the basic principle of all German strategy; now, as a result of the Feuhrer's "intuition," the Wehrmacht has four separate battlefronts to man. The job is too great for it, and only on one of the four—North Italy, and that only while the Allies build up their forcesis there any stability. East, West and South the pressure of encirclement is mounting to an intensity which is far beyond what the German leaders believed possible. Danzig and Gdynia have fallen, and with them have gone two of the last remaining refuges of the enemy's diminished fleet. The Russians are dashing through the Bratislava Gap en the road to Vienna, and on the West front the Allied spearheads of advance across the North German plain are so many that they constitute an almost unbroken line. Behind them are many centres of resistance—the mopping up process, the greatest* in all history, goes on fiercely but systematically, far behind the probing tank armies, but there are many signs that resistance is steadily crumbling.

Not very much is passing through the thick curtain cf silence which Field-Marshal Montgomery has dropped eastward of the line, but enough emerges to show that Germany has no longer any co-ordinated line in the West, not even on the map, and that from present appearances she is unable to mass sufficient forces to bolster up a continuous battlefront anywhere in the western-Reich. Resistance will go on, in patches—and in large and desperate patches, too —but the capture of Emmerich, where the most bitter and fanatical opposition was offered by a paratroop army, and the subsequent eight-mile drive eastward, indicate that the defensive forces will gradually be disintegrated and absorbed. The picture that will be thrown on the screen when the curtain is lifted will be a sensational one, but it is unwise to assume that the battle for Europe is yet won. Holland has not yet been cleared, and the mountainous country in the south of Germany, where the leaders of the Nazi gang are reported to have fled with strong and well-equipped forces, will probably offer a stout core of resistance when central Germany is no longer in the fight. Though Germany may be very sick with the self-distilled poisons of Nazi-ism, added to the material and moral starvation which is approaching, Hitler still thinks that he can snatch another victory from the jaws of defeat. He is leaving agents behind in every area abandoned to the -Allies, men who will form a Nazi underground, whose propaganda basis will be that the Allies have no real plan for post-war reorganisation on the Continent and that the Nazi elements can create sufficient doubt, •confusion and uncertainty to enable them to rearm Germany, just as they did in the truce between the two world wars. It will be the job of the Allies to prove that they have learned something about making, and keeping, the peace.