THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES Monday, March 26, 1945. “A NOBLE ADVENTURE”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25803, 26 March 1945, Page 4

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES Monday, March 26, 1945. “A NOBLE ADVENTURE”

The story of the Rhine crossing, which takes pride of place in the news to-day, is of an operation immense in its every aspect. The familiar term “ bridgehead ” does not suggest the scope of the new lodgment, and cannot convey significance of a mass movement of a great army, complete in every detail of material equipment, even to the übiquitous bulldozer, which is being transported in a matter of hours into a new battle area—into the inner ring where, in Field Marshal Montgomery’s homely but vivid phraseology, the enemy will be driven into his corner and knocked out! The statistics of this extraordinary leap over the Germans’ most effective defensive barrier—and one to which they have attached a mystical significance as a symbol of their nationhood and their way of life —are not less than staggering. They convey in figures that the mind is capable of grasping readily the vastness of the organisation which Field Marshal Montgomery had built up behind the concealing curtain of smoke along the west bank of the Rhine. But the operations themselves, in which, on a river front of some twenty miles, these concentrations of armour and men were thrown over the river in vessels that previously have had the open sea as their element, reject the neat formalisation that would bring them into the compass of the imagination. The enemy’s efforts to prevent the Rhine passage haye become, in the studied application of brain and mass to the Allied problem, contemptible—and the great river itself has been treated contemptuously by solid barrages, darting and lumbering armoured vessels, and a tidal wave of aircraft, all carrying out with precision their various assigned tasks of supply, transportation, destruction. As was here anticipated a few days ago, Montgomery did not await the consolidation of the American operations in the Saar; events, indeed, on that less vital front have moved so fast, with progress reckoned in hours that might have taken weeks, that tactical delay would have been strategically superfluous. He has fixed his vision upon the wider battleground, of the heart of the German nation, where the stumbling, driven armies of the Reich are being imprisoned in a giant nut-crackers. The Russians are pressing relentlessly on a front that is in motion from Stettin at the mouth of the Oder, from the approaches of Berlin itself, to the Austrian gateways, and the great assault in the west is now at last perfectly co-ordinated to exert an equal or greater pressure; The stage is being set for the final act of a drama which can have only one outcome —the most shattering and conclusive demonstration in history of the fate which awaits those who transgress humanity’s code. The watching and indomitable Churchill’s description of the operations as a noble adventure gives the key to the moral implications in the final task to which the Allies have set their hand. It is characteristic of the mentality which provoked this awful retribution that, as. Nazi orders to the German populace now make clear, Hitler and his colleagues are bent upon contributing themselves to the physical destruction that is being brought upon the nation.