NOTES ON THE WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 126, 30 May 1944, Page 4

NOTES ON THE WAR

WAYS OF ASSAULT

THE EUROPEAN FORTRESS

While the Italian battle is in its third phase, which will decide the fate of Rome and the German armies in the battlefield, the Allied air assault on Hitler's "Fortress Europe" has been stepped up to the point of 8000 tons of bombs dropped on various targets in 24 hours. Is this rate to be continued indefinitely, or is it the final stage of the preparation for the invasion of Europe by forces landed front the sea? There is much mystery about the whole business. Only the "heads" on the Allied side know the strength of the forces based in Britain for whatever form the assault will take. Only the German "heads" know the full extent and detail of the defences of the "Fortress." All that the outsider knows is that the enterprise of liberating Europe—President Roosevelt preferring "liberation" to "invasion" in his latest utterance —is on a scale and of a character wholly without precedent or parallel in the history of the world. The smoke screens of propaganda thicken the fog of war. The Germans, for instance, profess to be quite open about their defences and say they would "welcome" invasion. They tell interned newspapermen about to be released that the German engineers, with local labour mainly, have put 10,000,000 tons of cement into the "Atlantic Wall" and have built a "Mediterranean Wall' from the Pyrenees to the Alps. They declare that the Atlantic coast from the Pyrenees to the mouth of the Zuyder Zee is studded with 6000 permanent heavy guns set in steel and concrete, and 3000 mobile guns, together with railway guns and 170 m.m. field guns like those used in Italy. This would work out at . one gun to every 180 yards of open-sea perimeter front. In addition there would be the full complement of all sorts of lighter firearms, including rocket guns, and masses of minefields in the water and on land. Add to this the natural difficulties of coast, weather, and tide, which would make landing in many cases and over long stretches impossible. After a Landing. That is the German case, how much fact and how much fiction who can say? They would add, no doubt, that if the Allies did manage successful landings, they would have to fight their way across an intervening space into Germany much easier to defend than the broad plains of western Russia. This area of occupied country —France and the Low Countries, 700 miles from north to south and 300-400 east to west—is about equal to all that part of Russia reconquered by the Red Army since last July. The Italian campaign gives some idea of the difficulties. In the path of the Allied liberators of Europe from the west are a number of rivers, such as the Oise, the Meuse, and the Rhine, comparable with the Dnieper and the Dniester and the Pruth, with artificial barriers like the Maginot Line, with its guns turned west, and the Siegfried Line in Germany itself. Discounting Goebbels's propaganda leaves still a most formidable substratum of reality about the defences of the "Fortress." What help the invaders will get from the populations they have come to liberate is also an unknown quantity. It is four years now since Western Europe was overrun, and German agencies and quisling collaborationists have had time to do a lot of dirty work. Victory by Air Power. There is a considerable school of thought, in which recent visitors to Britain are inclined to believe, which takes the view that the ground defences of "Fortress Europe" are so strong that attempts to storm them from sea and land, even with powerful air support, may prove too costly to be feasible in the long run. On these lines they believe that invasion may not come so early as most people expect and may, indeed, in the ordinary sense of storming a defended coast to get a foothold and then fighting a way inland, not come at all. They would not consider it an invasion, if the defences and resistance were so paralysed by previous air attack that landings and advances were practically unopposed. Thus Major A. de Seversky, the most prominent advocate of "Victory through air power," writes that the Germans cannot provide their European fortress, with a roof of defensive air power, and that "We must continue to bomb across its walls and to demolish the core of Axis strength, which is the complex of industries, communication lines, and other strategic objectives in Germany proper. .. . The more concentrated, continuous, and thorough this bombardment, the smaller will be the total effort and the sacrifice needed to cause a collapse." Largely Experimental. Now there is some evidence that the present Allied aerial offensive, mounting in violence daily, is designed at least partially to follow the allout air plan. Any method used will, by the very fact that there is no precedent, be largely experimental, and in this problem time is a real factor. It is essential to end the war in Europe as quickly as can be in order to concentrate Allied strength on Asia and the Pacific. In eastern Europe the Russians are poising for the final spring; in Italy the campaign is making good progress; the Balkans are ready for Allied intervention to weld the patriot forces into a true army of liberation; a huge army is massed in Britain with all the engines of war to hand: all the circumstances point to a completion of the general assault on the "Fortress" by an attack from the west. It is hard to see how else than by such an attack the war in Europe could be ended soon.