Evening Post. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 1943. MORE MOURNING NEEDED FOR ROSTOV

Evening Post, Volume CXXXV, Issue 39, 16 February 1943, Page 4

Evening Post. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 1943. MORE MOURNING NEEDED FOR ROSTOV

The German mourning for the loss of the Sixth Army near Stalingrad should be followed by another period of mourning for Hitler's failure to profit by the time which the Sixth Army so dearly purchased for him. The time which Stalin is supposed to have lost while liquidating the Sixth Army provided a propagandist opportunity for Hitler and Goebbels, who said that Germany has been given a breathing spell sufficient for the taking of military measures to check the Russian tide, and for the restoration of the German^line in a strategically advantageous position. On occasions it is legitimate, of course, to put a high valuation on • the resistance factor of an isolated garrison. Much was heard, a couple of years ago, of a certain ten days of resistance in Crete. But everything that has happened in Russia since the mopping up of the Sixth Army gives the lie to the Nazi pretence that the resistance of the doomed army had blocked vital roads and had so affected the Red Army and its offensive plans as to discount its winter campaign. Nothing of the kind has happened. The Red Army has opened many roads, and its tide has rolled on, leaving Stalingrad and yon Pauliis far in the rear. When the Red Army wrote Stalingrad on its banner, the time it lost there did not reinsure Rostov, for Rostov has gone the way of Stalingrad. Wherever the German line chances to stabilise, it will not be where Hitler willed, and certainly will not pivot on Rostov.

During the last few months the Germans have had abundant opportunity to practise a movement that is somewhat new to them —large-scale retreat. This experience began in Africa, where Rommel put up his Marathon record, 1400 miles. Between the North African desert and the Mediterranean coast there were not many roads, as in broad Russia, but one main route. To the extent that his pursuer was compelled, therefore, to tread in his footsteps, Rommel had a splendid opportunity to demonstrate against his enemy the retarding value of mines, demolitions, booby traßs, etc. The pursuer's alternative was to make long and difficult detours into the desert, in the hope of carrying out such a rapid flank movement as to cut off part of Rommel's retreating army; but, notwithstanding such efforts, Rommel performed the considerable feat of bringing the kernel of the Afrika Korps into Tunisia. Russia, however, presents very different problems to the retreating German generals, who must either move quickly backward by rail before the railways are cut by the Russians, or must move along a system of roads that are paralleled, and which hold out the prospect of encirclement to any German army corps that hangs on too long to its heavy luggage. Probably no reliable estimate of German losses in this winter retreat from Russia will be available till after the war. . But it is quite certain that the pretence that "the Stalingrad time-factor could save Rostov was rubbish. And it is at least . doubtful whether many of the German 'divisions will escape with anything ; like the degree of salvage represented by Rommel's delivery in Tunis of the remnarfts of his Alamein forces.

The retreat from Moscow broke Napoleon, but not immediately. Has the retreat from Russia already broken Hitler? The Berne correspondent of the "New York Times" quotes a report "from neutral sources" that Hitler "is preparing to relinquish the supreme military command as a result of the defeat at Rostov, and to place it in the hands of Field-Marshal Fritz Erich yon Mannstein." If this is true, it is certainly a case for mourning; but the mourning will be in Moscow, for Russian strategists observe that the biggest mistake of Hitler's Russian war (apart from the folly of beginning it) was Hitler's assumption of the German supreme , command. Generalissimo Hitler was not a Russian debit; he was a Russian asset.' For all his remarkable statecraft extending over years, Hitler in battle measures up to corporal status only. He has proved to be a military Samson only to the extent of bringing their house down about the ears of the General Staff, who now have to clear away the mess. So it may not be entirely in the interest of the Allies if Hitler, the architect of military ruin, is demoted before the completion of his campaign of calamity. The "New York Times" is possibly right when it points out that in future, instead of Hitler using the German generals, the German generals may use him, by transferring him from the army to his old post of Fuhrer, in which his name—"still a name to conjure with in Germany"—may hold Germans together in Germany instead of merely spilling their blood in Russia. When such a speculation has become legitimate, even in New York, the star of Hitler must have paled indeed.