The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun END OF THE FIGHT IN ITALY

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 101, 1 May 1945, Page 4

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun END OF THE FIGHT IN ITALY

ORGANISED resistance has ceased in Italy, save in a very limited area in the north-west, where forces driving in from France are still meeting opposition, said General Eisenhower to-day. The German Army in Italy was the last powerful, well organised and cohesive force which the enemy had in the field. But for the lack of aerial support, it was a great army of seasoned fighters, hand-picked veteran divisions brought together under the most skilful commanders which Germany could find. The complete and humiliating defeat of its twenty-five divisions, plus six Fascist divisions saved from the wreck of the eight million rifles which Mussolini once boasted about, has broken the one remaining Nazi hope of a last-ditch stand which would drive the Allies into a negotiated peace. New the men who so wantonly brought Germany to the abyss are themselves looking over the precipice, and they do not like the view of the hell which they have created for their own destruction. The great significance of General Eisenhower's announcement can scarcely be appreciated at a moment when earth-shaking events are moving to their early and inevitable climax in the heart of the Reich.

At any other time the magnitude and importance of General Alexander's victory would have inflamed the whole Allied world, because it would have been regarded as the forerunner of the fall of Axis might. Coming, as it dees, almost simultaneously with the final ruin of Germany, its contribution to that ruin and its influence upon the whole course of the European war is apt to get out of perspective and to be lost amid the gunsmoke of the Berlin battlefield and in the present fog of Himmler's peace negotiations. The Italian war, overshadowed by the great events which have followed D day, has nevertheless been a great contributing factor in the brilliant success cf the giant sweep from Normandy to Berlin. It immobilised twenty to thirty of Germany's best fighting men, it drew immensely upon the dwindling reserves of the Reich in men, munitions, transport and overhead protection. It was kept there to hold the back door to the Bavarian stronghold, where Hitler planned to make his last stand, and to prevent the outflanking of his West Wall. It failed, and'its progressive failure was the warning signal for the greater armies of the east and west, the foreteller of their ultimate destruction.

The campaign has been a long and bloody one. No battleground has offered greater opportunities to the defence, opportunities of which the Germans availed themselves to the full, at the cost of weakening the Russian and the French fronts. When the assault began in September, 1943, it progressed with such speed that high hopes were exultantly held of a speedy drive through the country. But the Germans realised the peril, and with great speed and organising efficiency they threw division after division into the path. It took nine months to clear the road to Rome, and another nine months to open up the war to the northern plain, where the coup-de-grace was administered. The Germans fought with the cold ferocity of dehumanised fanaticism. They wreaked their yengeance upon their deserting jackal by bringing about the systematic destruction of every town and village through which they passed, moving from village to village, even though the open terrain would have been more favourable, in order to force the Allied artillery to reduce every habitation to ruin. Their larger strategy was sound. They held all the cards in defensive warfare, and their successive retreats amid the mountains were made to lines which made veritable death-traps for the attackers. Alexander never let them rest in any of those lines, but he was hampered by the greater demands cf the central campaign. He could not get the men or the guns he wanted for quick victory, so he kept steadily slogging on till he could pile up enough for the death blow. It was a composite army which overthrew the enemy's forces. "Alexander's ragtime band," as it called itself, from its diverse components, included Britishers, Canadians, Americans, Brazilians, Poles, Indians, Italians, South Africans and New Zealanders. And the last shall be first, for no one division bore so much of the brunt of the stiffest fighting in the long drive through the peninsula as Freyberg's men. '/ They fought valiantly and gloriously to break the successive German lines of resistance, and they worthily maintained the traditions which their fathers created thirty years ago.