"GREATEST BLOW" OF AIR WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 125, 23 November 1944, Page 6

"GREATEST BLOW" OF AIR WAR

The Allied policy of hitting the German defences in as many places as possible at the same time compels Germany to maintain reserves that can be moved rapidly from point to point. The opportune arrival of reserves can seal off an Allied breach in the German defence; but if there are several widely separated breaches, or several imminent threats of breach, the reserves must be moved very rapidly if they are to arrive -in time. The essence, therefore, of maintaining a German defence against a superior enemy

hitting at all points is German mobility; and that mobility pivots on fuel (except in tho case of slow, horse-driven traffic) and the maintenance of bridges and roads and communications. If the Allied air forces can pin down, or slow down, German reserves and reinforcements, by air attack upon fuel plants, roads, bridges, and railways, the chief weapon in the hands of German defensive strategy, the weapon of manoeuvre behind the lines, is heavily discounted. Several chapters have been written already in the story of the development of the Allies' strategic bombing—night bombing, day bombing, better aiming, better utilisation of fighter cover, etc.—but a very important new chapter opened when Germany rapidly lost France and Belgium and gave the Anglo-American forces invaluable continental aerodromes. While the Japanese are employing, large armies in China to push Allied aerodromes farther away, in Europe Allied aerodromes have come closer and closer to Germany, adding to the ferocity of the air blitz on all transport, on all traffic arteries, and on synthetic oil plants. General Eisenhower has been building for the critical moment when he can intensify his effort to cripple Germany's war machine behind the German lines; and it is significant that today the Press j Association's aviation correspondent feels able to say that "Germany's battered oil resources have received the greatest blow of the war."' Those arel big words, considering the thousand1 aeroplane raids of the past; but when the correspondent adds that the air j fleets, engaged in making this maximum j blow "probably totalled 3000 aeroplanes," it is seen that the difference is more than a difference of degree. Three thousand aeroplanes engaged in one day on the crippling of German power marks a new phase in the process known as "turning on the heat"; it is not the final phase, but it represents a November achievement which may well cause the whole population of Germany to ask itself whether it can continue to "take it" from countries that have so vastly improved on the lesson taught by Germany to Rotterdam and London. One November does not make a whole winter. Germany therefore faces the most dreadful winter in her history, carrying with it a paralysing threat to her military mobility, to her civilian communications, and to every human activity the continuity of which depends on transport and supply. j

A winter of flare-paths in western Germany will be also a winter of ice in the east. "Any day on the Russian front," it is cabled, "a large-scale winter offensive is expected. The weather is cold, though it has not yet hardened the ground sufficiently for a general offensive. Tho Vistula has not yet frozen and this is delaying the Red Army." In 1918 the British, French, and Americans in the west had to meet the shock of a German army reinforced by the arrival of many divisions from the east, no longer required to fight Russia, who had retired from the war. Yet Germany lost that one-front war in June-July-August, 1918, and surrendered in November. Today Germany fights not a one-front war but a two-fronts war on land plus war in the air. Her sun is setting; her satellites already have ceased to shine; and her quislings, like Petain and Laval, are pensioners on her hospitality. And all this debacle is quite on the lines of what she designed for others, and never has an aggressor's fate been better deserved.