THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES Thursday, March 22, 1945. THE FINAL PHASE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25800, 22 March 1945, Page 4

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES Thursday, March 22, 1945. THE FINAL PHASE

The danger of too confident speculation concerning the duration of the war in Europe has been so often demonstrated that the public should no longer need to be warned to use caution in accepting the predictions of experts. Mr Churchill has himself, when the enemy has shown an unexpected capacity for recovery from the shock of devastating Allied attack, found it necessary to revise, from time to time, estimates made in the flush of outstanding military success. It must be assumed, therefore, that he spoke with a studied deliberation when he told the conference of the Conservative Party last week that the defeat of Gei’many might be accomplished before the end of this European summer. It is possible, indeed, that his utterance gave the cue to those military commentators in London who are now suggesting that April might be “ the decisive month ” in Europe. But even that prediction, it should be noted, is made against a background of qualification, and it will be well if it is studied in that light. It is, of course, demonstrable that the enemy in Europe has suffered enormous, perhaps crippling, losses in war potential in the past six months. In Eastern Europe the Russians have come close to closing the vital gateways from the Reich to the plains of the Danube. It is true also that the threat to Austria is heightened by the suggestion that Marshal Tolbukhin is ready to launch a threepronged drive towards “ the back door of the German mountain stronghold in Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, and Bavaria.” Success here would not only limit drastically Hitler’s prospect of securing further supplies *of Danubian wheat, but might at the same time sever, the line of retreat for von Kesselring’s divisions in Northern Italy, should the Fuhrer decide to recall them along the steadily-bombed escape route of the Brenner for a last-ditch stand in the Nazi reduit. The compression of the Reich is fast becoming a fact with which the German High Command must reckon. Through the Palatinate in the west the American thrusts are aimed at securing control of the remaining stretches of the Rhine’s west bank. When that is achieved there may be, as the correspondents have been indicating, another pause for consolidation, but it is certain that the Remagen bridgehead will then be supplemented by other crossings of the wide river, for which British and American engineers have long been in readiness. On the Oder front the Russians have virtually completed the straightening of their long line —from Dresden, say, to Danzig—and Marshal Zhukov is poised at the centre with a tremendous concentration of troops and armour, for the blow at Berlin. The military dispositions of . the Allies, in particular those of the Russians in Pomerania and of the British and Americans in the advanced salient beyond Arnhem, support the assumption that the lirtk-up will take place somewhere in the Hanoverian plains. Apparently, therefore, the observers of Allied strategy in London are anticipating what should be the most impressive Allied strike of the war, in co-ordinated offensives against the Austrian border, and across the Oder westwards and from the Rhine bridgeheads eastwards towards the heart of Germany. How the enemy may react to a menace of such magnitude does not, at the moment, come usefully within the scope even of speculation. threatened to bring down the Whole Reich, if necessary, in his own catastrophic fall, and Goebbels has assiduously fostered, in the mass mind of the German people, the belief that the Allies propose to encompass nothing less than their elimination as a national group. In such circumstances the . German will to make a last, almost a sacrificial, stand may have been fortified beyond present external knowledge. What a London newspaper has called the German “ strategy of immolation ” may, in brief, present itself as the ultimate forbidding problem for the Allies. The Nazi hope, this newspaper, has said, is “to sow discord between Russia and her western Allies, and prolong on the Continent conditions of* starvation and turmoil with which U.N.R.R.A. will be powerless to cope and in which surviving Fascist elements in all countries—outposts of the reduit—can defeat every effort at social and economic reconstruction.” That is indeed a sombre picture of the possibilities inherent in Allied failure to destroy irretrievably the evil forces of Nazi-ism in the shortest possible time.