Evening Post. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1943. "RUTHLESS" REFLECTION IN GERMANY

Evening Post, Volume CXXXV, Issue 31, 6 February 1943, Page 4

Evening Post. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1943. "RUTHLESS" REFLECTION IN GERMANY

From "the bitter lesson of Stalingrad," says General Dietmar, the Germans "will ruthlessly draw every lesson we can." If the German people do actually possess the ability to ruthlessly analyse experience and to draw unpalatable conclusions regardless of who suffers, then they must conclude, beyond all shadow of doubt, that Dietmar quite recently talked humbug to them when he stated the principles of the "hedgehog" tactics. He said quite clearly that reliance on the resistance power of encircled bodies j of troops was a part of German! strategy. The meaning of this is perhaps explainable by comparing the Russian battlefield with rising and falling tides on a coast where rocks exist within tidal limits. When the tide falls, signifying a German advance, the rocks stand clear. When the tide comes back, signifying a Russian advance, the rocks are covered. Dietmar's recent contention amounts to a claim that the "encircled bodies of German troops" are like rocks that somehow defy the Russian tide and keep their heads above water, awaiting the ebb and the victorious return. of the Germans to the ebbline. But there is not going to be an ebb; and if there was one, it would disclose no German rock near Stalingrad. The rock is liquidated. Dietmar .now mourns the passing away of the rock whose staunchness he proclaimed so recently. These rocks—these "encircled bodies of German troops," standing like bastions, defying the encircling Russians—-were deemed so staunch that tfiey were a recognised part of German strategy, according to Dietmar. If so, German' strategy has received a terrible shock, over and above the material and human losses involved in the liquidation of the Stalingrad encirclement and of other similar liquidations now pending. Here, then, is a "ruthless" lesson for German strategists to draw concerning themselves. And if the German people think with equal "ruthlessness*," they will have the poorest possible opinion of these strategists on whom they have relied and who stand now condemned out of their own mouths. A German who thinks "ruthlessly" will be compelled now to think one of two things. Either he will think that a German strategy based on the resistance power of "encircled bodies of troops" has been exploded by the despised Russians; or else he will think that when Dietmar asserted this strategical principle, Dietmar did so in order to excuse Hitler's failure to withdraw to a safe winter line those German armies thatlured by Stalingrad and Caucasus oil, were left in the blue, doomed to be surrounded or perhaps to narrowly escape. Dietmar thus found a strategical pretext to palliate Hitler's blunder. But since then the bubble has burst with the Sixth Army's surrender. Even a rudimentary thinker, quite devoid of mental "ruthlessness," will surely connect Hitler's order for Stalingrad mourning with Hitler's earlier order that Stalingrad must and shall be taken. Stalingrad was not taken, but the besieging German Sixth Army was; hence these tears. Meanwhile, at a time when things were looking bad for the Sixth Army, but not yet hopeless, Dietmar stood^up to twist strategy a little in order to profade Hitler with a strategic blanket to cover his military nakedness. Few people would be so cruel as to try to snatch away this scanty covering; but if there are any mentally "ruthless" Germans, their "painful lesson" of ex"perience must now be complete. They see Hitler today as being more than ever a little corporal, having become rather fat, and having shown only a corporal's grip of the problems of high strategy. In the German celebrations of the tenth year of his seizing of power, Hitler has played the part of the invisible man. He and Mussolini both are given to longer silences. In fact, Hitler is becoming a bit of a "hedgehog" himself, while Goebbels heads the peace drive and Himmler throttles down German home resistance. "Up to the late autumn of last year [that is, until- near the close of 1942] the Germans (Dietmar now asserts) had never thought of reverse or defeat." The inference is obvious. At last Germany has learned from the Russians "how suddenly, disorderly flight can change to furious counterattack." They have also learned that encircled troops are less an asset than a debit How strange this rediscovery of an ancient commonplace!