RUNDSTEDT AND AFTER

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25804, 27 March 1945, Page 4

RUNDSTEDT AND AFTER

Luck has not favoured Field-marshal Albert Kesselring. It has been his fortune in this war to command German arms in three of the most crucial campaigns—the Battle of Britain, when he commanded the first German operational air fleet, the battle for Malta, when, his ,air armada again assaulted by night and day in vain, and the fighting in Italy. In all these campaigns he has possessed at the important stage superior force; and, in all he has failed. But he has not lost the confidence of those who, from the mountains of Bavaria or the cellars of Berlin, are ruling what is left of Germany. If he did not win the battle for Italy—his defeat on the Salerno beaches ruled out the possibility of an Axis victory—he has fought with skill the long, arduous campaign that now seems likely to end only when the war in the west ends. It is perhaps not surprising on Kesselring’s record as a military stone-waller that he should have been rushed from Northern Italy to take command in the west in the hour of his country’s extremity. But Field-marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, whom Kesselring is reported to have displaced, is likewise a general tried and skilled in defence, his very name in its original form meaning a fortress (round-house). The significance of the change in the German Supreme Command, which a Reuter’s correspondent happily describes as a changing of horses in midRhine, should perhaps be sought in the political rather than the military sphere. Rundstedt, who is reported to have been relegated to a minor command, is the last of the great Prussians with whom —and through whom—Hitler began the war and, to a point, succeeded in it. His acceptance of this upstart rabble-rouser was very positive. He could probably, as army chief in Berlin, have prevented the Nazi seizure of power; but the army at that time thought the Austrian house-painter could be fashioned as their tool. Since that tragic error of judgment, which Rundstedt may now regret as deeply as other people do, but for different reasons, he has served his State as a Prussian should. He directed with cold precision the invasion of Poland from Slovakia, lie manoeuvred the break-through at Sedan, and reached the Channel and Dunkirk in eleven days; he brought Marshal Budenny near to disaster at Kiev, and if his colleagues had succeeded equally on the Moscow and Leningrad fronts the war with Russia might have gone differently. His first failure was on D-Day, where he was in command against the invading forces. 'But his dismissal when the defence system fell which he had laboriously devised was short-lived. That failure may have disturbed Hitler’s finest faith in Rundstedt’s military skill. The subsequent whisperings of an Army plot, culminating in the bomb episode, may have shaken belief in him as a Nazi. Although

he was co-chairman of the court which coldly handed over to the civilian authorities for execution two Prussian generals who w'ere apparently implicated, there remained the possibility that he was not unsympathetic with their abortive plans. Yet Germany was to call on him again in the west, for another gallant failure. Hitler may have felt, after the Ardennes offensive had been controlled and defeated by the Allies, that the Prussian was too old. Or the old Prussian may have chosen to dissociate himself, after this last throw, as he himself described it, from the inevitable German defeat, as from the fanatical Nazi scheme of Gotterdammerung. It will suit the Prussian Junkers for Germany to go down under the Sign of the Swastika, which they wore without pride. Kesselring, while a product of the General Staff, and an Army man all the time, is not by his South German background bound by the same stiffnecked tradition. And is it possible that Hitler sees a final advantage in a Bavarian as military leader as the Nazis prepare for their shabby reproduction in the alpine hinterland of the self-destroying drama of Samson Agonistes?