NOTES ON THE WAR NEWS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXV, Issue 40, 17 February 1943, Page 4

NOTES ON THE WAR NEWS

KHARKOV AND -?

HITLER'S HIGH COMMAND

The fall of Kharkov, announced this morning, coming so soon on top of the Red Army's recovery of Rostov, Voroshilovgrad, and the Donbas, shows the Axis in full retreat from positions held for eighteen months and crumbling to a collapse in a region which had begun to be regarded as almost part of the Reich. Kharkov in Russian hands gives the Red Army possession of one of Russia's greatest trunk railways, that from Moscow to Sebastopol over a stretch from Orel to beyond Likhvaya junction, south of Kharkov. If Orel falls—as it soon may—the line will be open from Moscow.

The importance of Kharkov can hardly be exaggerated. It is the fourth largest city of the Soviet Union, coming after Moscow, Leningrad and the oil city of Baku with Kiev and Rostov at the next in succession. Capital of the Eastern Ukraine and an industrial city described as Russia's Birmingham it was also Hitler's chief base for the Eastern Ukraine and Donbas. The war material gathered by the Germans at Kharkov must be immense, and can hardly have been more than fractionally removed or destroyed, for the time has been too short for that. It is the greate.it loss Hitler and his war-makers have yet sustained, and the consequences are likely to be profound. From Kharkov the Red Army will even now be pushing on, fanning out north-west to meet other Russian columns advancing from Kursk, and driving south along t:ie main line towards the Crimea to cutoff the retreat of the Germans trom Taganrog and the Lower Donbas. of which Stalino is the centre, south of the Stalino-Dniepropetrovsk railway, the only east-west line of importance in this area of open steppe. Incidentals the Moscow-Sebastopol trunk line touches the Dnieper at the new city of Zaporozhe, near the great dam over the river, blasted by the Russians in their retreat before Rundstedt eighteen months and more ago. Before the Thaw. It has been calculated that there are roughly about four weeks more of campaigning weather in the Ukraine before the spring thaw bogs down military operations for another month or two. At the rate the Russians are going now they might even cross the Dnieper, liberate the Crimea, and pick up a few Axis armies in their stride. The country itself does not lend itself to defensive operations, and there are not likely to be any more big "hedgehogs" like Kharkov and Kursk about, for these cannot be created in a few days. Once an army is on the run across this great black soil plain of southern Russia from Poland to the Volga it is difficult for the High Command to call a halt anywhere. Marshal Budenny found that out in facing the first German onslaught in the summer of 1941 under Rundstedt, but Budenny managed to extricate most of his armies. It is a much harder task for the German i leaders to do that now, after their losses and in their exhaustion. It is J quite possible then to believe that the Red Army may cross at least the lower j Dnieper from Kiev to its mouth at Kherson, repeating in the Dnieper elbow its performances in the Don and Donets elbows. The positions are much the same. Even if the Red Army does not get so far, it will have done marvellously and have decisively defeated Hitler in Russia. The German General Staff. Where is Hitler now? His voice has not been heard in the land or over the air now since the relief of Stalin- J grad. For what has happened in Russia Hitler must take most of the blame. It is certain that the old school of German military leaders, dating back to the Prussian General Staff of yon Moltke's day in the FrancoPrussian War of 1870-71 would not have fallen into such disasters. Under Field-Marshal yon Moltke, the ablest soldier of his age, the Imperial General Siaff of the German Empire acquired supreme power behind the throne of the old Emperor William I, and gave, in Bismarck's words, "the breath of life to an otherwise lifeless Colossus." The Emperor William 11, the Kaiser of the Great War, 1914-18, set Hitler the example by sacking Bismarck and making himself military as well as political chief. He told the younger Moltke, nephew of the old Field Marshal, "if war breaks out I shall be my own Generalstabchef (Chief of General Staff)." The Kaiser was as good as his word and interfered in the first month of the war by demanding and securing the transfer of an army from Moltke's command in France to meet the Russians in East Prussia. Thus weakened, yon Moltke was beaten at the Battle of the Marne, and was dismissed by the Kaiser. In 1916 yon Falkenhayn devised the Brennofen (roasting oven) theory and tried to make Verdun the oven in which every French division, and, later, British too, was to be roasted to a cinder. The Somme battle overthrew his plans, and he also was dismissed. Ludendorff took over, with Hindenburg as Commander-in-Chief and figureehad, but it was then too late. Hitler and His Generals. The Treaty of Versailles forbade the existence of the German General Staff, but it was secretly preserved and as early as 1923 took up Hitler to make use of him, at a price. But the monster they created proved their undoing. Yon Seeckt went, and then Blomberg, followed by yon Fritsch and yon Brauchitsch. It was in 1938 that General Franz Haider took over as Chief of the General Staff on the pricipal that, * while accepting Germany's large international policy and the preparation for war, he was not prepared to interfere actively with Hitler and his special interpretation of that policy. In the first stages of the present war —in Poland, Norway, and France—the general staff had its way and the campaigns there and in Greece show the influence of traditional thinking and long-elaborated plans, such as the advance on yon Schlieffen lines through the Lowlands in France. It was when it came to Russia that Hitler seems to have taken the command into his own hands. He certainly quarrelled with his generals there, and made himself supreme at the time of the first Russian counter-offensive of the winter of 1941-42. His comparative success in holding the "hedgehog" line must have given him further confidence, with the results the world is now witnessing in Russia. General Haider has been superseded by yon Zeitzler, a newcomer, who, like Rommel, did not graduate through the ordinary military channels, but began his career in Hitler's S.S., the Black Guards. Where is Hitler now? Nobody seems to'know, but if the general staff has ousted him from the military sphere to leave him as the titular Fuhrer, it looks as if the professional doctors had been called in too late to save the patient from the effects of the quack's treatment of the case.