Evening Post. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 1943. CAN HITLER HARDEN THE SOFT SOUTH?

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 121, 18 November 1943, Page 4

Evening Post. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 1943. CAN HITLER HARDEN THE SOFT SOUTH?

It must be conceded to Hitler that he is sparing no pains to make the "soft underbelly" of Europe as hard as possible. He is fighting determinedly to maintain a defensive line south of Rome, at a time when commentators had anticipated that he would have been pushed back northward to the line of the Po. In the Balkan Peninsula his defence has not been called on to yield an inch; on the other hand, his air and sea power in that quarter have been projected seaward and he has reconquered several of the Dodecanese islands fromthe British and Italians. In between the Balkan and Italian peninsulas he is reported to have retaken from the guerrillas of the Yugoslav theatre several coastal towns or ports whose temporary occupation by the guerrilla or Italian forces had offered a threat to German power in the upper Adriatic. At the other (western) end of the "soft underbelly" Hitler has developed aerodromes near Marseilles, southern France, into hard-hitting air bases, "whose increasing air attacks on our convoys in the western Mediterranean" have become sufficiently serious to be punished by special raids by the United States air forces. When Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica were lost, Hitler did not cry over spilt milk, but tried to make southern France take up the air-war job of those lost islands. His improvisation certainly has produced results. We must give the devil his due. Hitler therefore stands in the position of a belligerent who has been forced on to the defensive —making his strategic future bleak—but who is trying hard to redeem that disadvantage by tactical energy which must command respect. Lately he has been losing comparatively little ground along the line of the "soft underbelly" but has been losing or giving away a large amount of ground on the farstretching Russian front. That is to say, Hitler has been standing firm in the narrow places—the peninsulas—as a defender of narrow places should, but has apparently abandoned all his original idea of an aggressive campaign of conquest in the wide plains of Russia, and is content to retire before or be driven by the Red Army. This transition of Germany to the defensive—very "elastic" in Russia, rather stiff in Italy and the Dodecanese —represents military necessity, and possibly political design as well. Military necessity could be of two kinds; there is the necessity which is founded on consumption of military reserves—a desperate case—and there is the necessity that is founded on conservation of reserves, an entirely different case. As to political motive, it well may be that Hitler and Ribbentrop have not abandoned hope of a compromise with Russia, and will try again to placate Moscow when Russian soil has been reconquered from the invader. And a policy of hoping to conciliate Russia connotes at once a policy of stemming the progress of the Anglo-Americans in southern Europe.

Gone are the days of German continental conquest by "blitz." Hitler therefore has grasped at the next best thing; that is to say, if his role must be defensive, particularly in the soft south, then he will make that defensive as vigorous as possible, and as impressive as possible to the neutral world. His reconquests in the Dodecanese not only fit into Germany's military necessity but must also profoundly impress Turkey—a contemplative observer of dying gladiators in the Leros colosseum —as well, as boost German home morale. These objectives would have been rather small in the eyes of Hitler as the conquering Alexander of 1940-41, but they are very important to Hitler the appeaser. It has to be admitted that Hitler improves on the technique of nearly everything he tackles, and it may b2 his destiny to show the world a new technique of defence and of appeasement —rescuing military defence from the ignominy which overwhelmed it when the Maginot Line failed, and | imparting to appeasement a complexion utterly different from the drab colour it assumed at Munich. But whatever uncertainty may attach to the methods and objectives of the appeasement campaign to which force of circumstances has committed Hitler, the fact remains that he has at least succeeded in attaching a question mark to the phrase "soft underbelly of Europe."

It is almost equally sure that this success has been bought only at the price of prodigious war efforts which Germany ultimately will find to be weakening. Temporarily the shortterm view of Hitler's southern defence is better; the long-term view of Germany's plight remains. Hitler gains something here to lose something else there. In the long run his Russian and 'his Italian accounts cannot balance. Political manoeuvre supplies him only with faint hope. Strategy promises none at all. Allied victory is certain, assuming Allied unity.