NOTES ON THE WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 133, 2 December 1944, Page 6

NOTES ON THE WAR

ALLIED SUPPLY

ANTWERP AVAILABLE^ One of the most important, if not the most spectacular, items of war news today is that wfyich announces the arrival of the first Allied supply i convoy at Antwerp. This should relieve what has been the Allies' most serious problem on the Western Front —supply; So long as supplies had to come by a roundabout route across France from Cherbourg and the D Day artificial harbours of Normandy, there was inevitable delay before an offensive could be undertaken while supplies were accumulated at a far slower rate than they would be expended by assault on a large scale. Antwerp, the third port of peacetime Europe, was occupied with most of its facilities entirely undamaged, but the opening of the. approaches to it entailed a strenuous and arduous, as well as costly, campaign. Land, communications from Antwerp-will cover at least the northern half of the Western Front. The reopening of the port of Antwerp and the liberation of southern Holland, essentially an Anglo-Cana-dian operation, has been a very valuable contribution to the Allied cause in the west. ■' It should enable the Allies to' keep up the tempo of their offensive so far as supply of war material is concerned. This is really the crucial factor of the whole compaign in the west," if it is to succeed ,without undue prolongation of the war in Europe. There should now not be any complaint of shell shortage among the Allies—the American forces mainly—such as the U.S. Secretary of War, Mr. Stimson, disclosed in a Washington statement reported yesterday. If the Allies are to win through in the west with minimum casualties in the minimim time, they will have to "crash" the defences with shell fire and air bombardment. The German line, running from the North Sea at the .Hook of Holland to Basle on the Swiss frontier, cannot be outflanked at either end and must be pierced. • Eelative Strength. Now that the Allies are fairly well assured of a sufficiency of supplies, the question becomes one of relative man-power. Can the Germans continue to man the 500 miles of the Western Front in sufficient strength to hold off the Allies; and, if so, for how long? In this connection the observations of correspondents at the British headquarters in Belgium, mentioned in the news today, are interesting.- The suggestion is that, though Germany has managed to muster fresh reserves and raise the number of divisions on the Western Front from 65 to 70, the divisions themselves are reduced in. size, and the total of able-bodied soldiers of military age is put down as no more than \\ millions. These forces have to fight the battle of Germany against substantially larger Allied numbers, and there is obviously little margin left to the defenders for strategic manoeuvre, that is, the rushing of reinforcements of fresh troops to any threatened spot where weak-, ness has become evident. Evening- Up the Balance.. Up to the present since the Western Front was formed nearly three months ago, the Germans have had the advantage of interior and lateral lines of, supply, but the reopening of Antwerp and the partial and progressive restoration of .the Channel ports, together with the improvement of overland communications, damaged in the Battle of France, should even up the balance in favour of the Allies. .In the terrific conflict npw developing all along the Siegfried Line weight of men and metal; together with air mastery, must tell against th^e Germans in a run, which may be long, but also, if the Germans \ crack, can be short. There has been no sign, as yet of a break-through like that at Avranches on the Normandy front on August I—some 54 days after D Day—but the position is not altogether dissimilar on the Western Front, if on a much larger scale. In Normandy, the Allies were bottled up for nearly eight weeks between the sea off the mouth of ;the. Seine and the Gulf of St. Malo; today on the Western Front they have similar limits in the North Sea and the Swiss frontier, and they will have to break through somewhere between the 'two. The best way into Germany is via the Aachen gap, but that is also, quite naturally, the most strongly-defended position of Germany's West Wall. This corresponds with the Caen sector of the Normandy front. Position in Alsace. But if the Germans can hold the Allies in the Aachen Gap, they can do it only at the cost of weakness elsewhere. They are obviously weaker in Alsace, but not quite so weak as seemed likely when the Seventh- Army broke through to Strasbourg and the French First Army to the Rhine from Belfort. At first it looked as if the two Allied forces might carry out a pincer movement on the Alsace plain between the Rhine and the Vosges, and so trap the German 19th Army in the Vosges. But once more the Germans rallied from the initial shock, and by counter-attacks at both ends of the pincers have managed to keep the jaws open and a way of escape. It will probably! be found that the weather here, as on all other fronts, has very materially helped the defenders. The Allies are not "at the gates of Colmar," as reported from Paris a week ago, and the French First Army has had to fight hard to clear the southern corner of Alsace, south of Mulhquse, of the enemy. It is ' clear that there can be no blitzkrieg in winter rain and mud. All Germany's blitzkrieg successes in 1939, 1940, and 1941—Poland, Western Europe, the Balkans—were achieved in the finest of weather, which also favoured their first advance into Russia in the summer of 1941. All the Allied sweeps in the west were summer offensives. In autumn and winter the conditions everywhere have suspiciously resembled those of the Western Front in the 1914-18 War. The present Allied offensive in the west will demonstrate whether or not a successful winter offensive against a fortified zone is possible.