PROUD & HOPEFUL

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 56, 4 September 1944, Page 3

PROUD & HOPEFUL

PEOPLE OF BRITAIN

"A GREAT WEEKEND"

(Special P.A. Correspondent) Rec. 9.30 a.m. LONDON, September 3. This is a great weekend in Britain. After a week of almost breath-taking advances in France, people today, with churchbells summoning them for a day of prayer, cast their minds,back to that other Sunday five years ago when they listened to Mr. Chamberlain's fateful words and anticipated the future with gloomy foreboding. Today they can scarcely realise that with the -Battle of France won, the final battle of the war—the Battle of Germany—is beginning. Today the people of Britain are quietly proud and hopeful, proud of their soldiers, who, with the Canadians, defeated the flower of ' the Seventh German Army on the .battlefield around Caen, one of the decisive battles of the war, even though it may not have been spectacular in the initial advances, and hopeful that the war may soon be ended. ' Chief attention is now focused on whether the Germans can fight another battle in the west before the Allied forces march into. Berlin, and whether or not they can stage a last fight, perhaps on the Siegfried Line. Some believe that Germany has fought her last battle in the. west, because General Eisenhower is succeeding in his immediate aim of piercing the German frontier defences before any part of the Wehrmacht can get back to man those defences. , GERMAN ARMIES PINNED DOWN. "Liberator," in the "Observer," declares there are ho battleworthy re-

serves left in Germany for throwing into the gap, but only garrison troops, police units, and half-trained recruits, and that the arsenals of the Ruhr and the Saar lie virtually open to the vie- ■ torious Allies. He points out that the German armies, like chess pieces, are l pinned down and immobilised in every . > corner of the European board, unable to intervene while the checkmate is being administered in the centre. Asking "Where is what is left of the Wehrmacht?" "Liberator" replies: Four to five divisions are, bottled up m ports of Britanny, six to seven are struggling to escape from the Rhone valley, eight to ten are immobilised . on the Atlantic Wall, over twenty face the Gothic Line, while patches of advance guards seep into the plain of Lombardy behind them, 165 are scattered up and down the Eastern Front, a dozen are idle in Norway, and seven in north Finland. There is one army in Greece, and two divisions are guarding Crete." "It is the most fantastic picture that can be imagined," he remarks. ■ , «oThl militery correspondent of the Sunday Times," Brigadier E C Anstey, says that whether the Germans try to hold the Siegfried Line or the Rhine they will have to defend every inch of 400 miles, and their army of the west, with its great concentrations of panzer divisions, has ceased to exist. «m^ re ls no nucleus on which to form. The race for Germany between the Allied armies arid German fugitives from France is one of the most draw!o^ ? un" he says- "If the Allies haye the stamina to stay the course, if their administrative-services can rel peat again and again the miracles they nave already performed, and if iri consequence the Allies can forestall the enemy m his Western Wall, wherever it may be, the last phase of the war will have arrived—the war will have been carried into Germany.".