NOTES ON THE WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 93, 17 October 1944, Page 4

NOTES ON THE WAR

RACE WITH TIME

ALLIES IN EUROPE

The issue in the European war is ever clearer as the days pass. It is a race against time, the Allies wanting to finish the war before winter sets in or at least by the end of this year; the Germans fighting to prolong the war in order to gain a compromise peace, or at least something better than unconditional surrender. This is the problem, no doubt, air. Churchill is discussing with Marshal Stalin in Moscow, how to hasten the end of the war. The Western Front, if not so static, has assumed some of the aspects of the Western Front of 1914-18. The blitzkrieg sweep over France has come to a halt in which gains are counted by yards, not miles. Progress is no quicker in Italy and the Russians have their hands full on the Polish front. Only in Hungary and the Balkans is the war still one of manoeuvre and movement, and even here the enemy resistance is tough enough. The Allied forces—British Imperial, American, and French—liberated France and Belgium Sn August* and September, leaving islands of enemy resistance in several areas to their rear in order to get to the German frontier before the enemy could organise a defensive front. Everywhere they came up against resistance that could not be easily overrun, and the Arnhem airborne adventure was the last strategic stroke that looked like succeeding in the main job of outflanking the German defences. When that failed there was nothing left but heavy slogging against an enemy favourably placed for defence and of restored morale. Resistance in East. . At much the same time, perhaps a little earlier, the Russians came up against similar resistance in the East, with the Germans strongly entrenched m the Carpathians and on the Baltic on the flanks of the Russian salient at Warsaw and to the south. Still, the Russians had .. room to manoeuvre, which is more than the Western Allies have after the failure at Arnhem, and, after a pause, they proceeded to eliminate the threats to their flanks, first, by liquidating German resistance in the Baltic States north of East Prussia, and, second, by outflanking the enemy's Carpathian flank in a drive across the Danube into the Balkans, and an attack through Hungary towards the southern side of the Carpathians. Both moves have succeeded, and the Russian salient in Poland has now become more of a German salient—a double salient with one projection in East Prussia and another in Hungarian Transylvania. It is obvious that the weather has slowed down both operations. Enemy in Balkans. -u^*.,lllol^ 113 ago ifc was estimated that the Germans had 26 divisions south of the Danube in the Balkans and the same number in Italy This was before the "winter line" in Italy had fallen, to the Allied assault in May, culminating in the fall of Rome' on June 4. Today the Germans have evacuated southern Greece and some of the Greek islands in the lonian and Aegean Seas. The British detachments now in southern Greece and the liberated islands have nowhere found the enemy in force or made great hauls of prisoners—at the most a few hundreds. Have the Germans managed to withdraw the bulk of their divisions in the Balkans? To do so by land would have been singularly difficult, as there is only one line of railway out of Greece to the north—the Athens-Salonika trunk line, a most vulnerable line with viaducts across gorges and many tunnels, easily blocked. Beyond Salonika there is again only one good outlet— up the Vardar Valley and into the Morava Valley and so to Belgrade and the Danube. This escape route has been cut by the Russian capture of Nish, the key junction of the OrientExpress route .to Istanbul with the Salonika line. It is known that the Germans have been'trying to evacuate their Aegean and Greek forces by air with Athens as a "staging" centre, but the Allies have been on the alert to hamper these moves, and it is hard to see how the Germans could have got out m this way more than a small percentage of their total forces. Softer in the South. Thus the situation in the Balkans is not yet clear, and there is certainly no definite front there as there is north of the Carpathians, in Italy £"L mi&? West T along the approaches lv "ie Rhine. It has long been clear that the most promising approach to the heart of the Reich and the quickest way to end the war is up the valley of the Danube to Vienna, with easy side roads into Silesia, Czechoslovakia, and .Saxony. The German High Command has always been peculiarly sensitive to any threat to Germany from the south, and recommended in October, 1918, a request for an armistice after Bulgaria had been defeated and the Allies of the Salonika armies were marching on the Danube. That is why there is such a desperate effort now to hold the Danube gateway by forcing the Hungarians to continue the fight. The Italian front continues, as it has been since Salerno, 13 months ago, the scene of some of the toughest fighting of the whole war. lis h^d to see why Kesselring should ding so fanatically to the Gothic Line when the Germans would be safe behind the Alps, unless it is in pursuance of the whole German military policy—at the instigation of Hitler himself, perhaps—to fight a suicidal struggle here as in the west of' i ranee just to gain time and inflict as much loss on the Allies as possible as far away as possible from the German frontier. . It looks once more as ii air power would have to be called in to tip a static land balance in favour of the Allies.