The Timaru Herald TUESDAY, JANUARY 23, 1940 Germany Must Strike

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21559, 23 January 1940, Page 6

The Timaru Herald TUESDAY, JANUARY 23, 1940 Germany Must Strike

IN surveying the courses open to Germany now that the tentative stage of the war is nearing its end, the Berlin correspondent of the Aew y ork Times has not indulged in fanciful speculations. He says it is generally acknowledged that unless Hitler attacks by the spring it will be too late for him to attack at all. It is believed that until then the Germans will hold military superiority over the Allies, but after the spring the Allies will be in a position of equality. There is truth in the suggestion that the military tradition of Germany demands a smashing blow westward. Hitler, it seems, favours this action, but none of his generals is willing to accept responsibility for it. This is easy enough to understand. A smashing blow in the west, even if temporarily successful, would not be decisive. If the Nazis thought they could breach the Maginot Line they would have attempted to do so as soon as the Polish campaign was completed. Nazi reluctance to attack is due only to one reason: they know they must fail, and a move in the west would be the first step towards a defeat which cannot be avoided in any case. Germany is so certain to lose the war that the only possible reading of the situation last August and September is that the Nazis did not believe they would be confronted by the combined might of the British Empire and France. But the war has come, and although victory is sure there should be no attempt to minimise the striking power of Germany. Oswald Garrison Villard, one of America’s most distinguished newspaper reporters, has been in Germany recently and his conclusion is that the war has united the nation. Reverses may work the other way, but so far the Nazis have had no major reverses to explain to their people. On all sides there is confidence in Germany’s military superiority, but even now the nation’s economic endurance is being questioned. However, American and other neutral observers, as well as the Germans themselves, are satisfied that where food and raw materials are concerned Germany can hold on, painfully perhaps, for two years or more. Mr Villard, in spite of sympathy for the Allied cause, is anxious, after his study of Germany, that the British people should realise the gravity of the situation now facing them.

This thought has been echoed by the Spectator which said recently: “Nothing could be more fatal than to underrate the (lower of Germany and the resolve of her rulers to inflict defeat on Great Britain at any cost. A sober survey of all the factors justifies the confidence that they will not succeed, but the vastest machine ever constructed in all history will not itself be broken without a struggle so cataclysmic that the mind shrinks involuntarily from computing what fragments of civilisation will be left surviving. We may have to face carnage as terrible as in the Passchendaele autumn and days as critical as in the 1918 offensive, together with air warfare of a scale for which no semblance of a precedent exists.” Those are uncomfortable words, but the truth inherent in them cannot be denied. Germany will strike because the country has been organised by the Nazis for striking, but the turning aside of the thrusts will demand tremendous sacrificial effort on the part of the Allies.