The Timaru Herald MONDAY, JULY 3, 1944. German Railway Defence

Timaru Herald, Volume CLVI, Issue 22934, 3 July 1944, Page 4

The Timaru Herald MONDAY, JULY 3, 1944. German Railway Defence

|\ the past year the German Army has lost much of the blood and iron that were its greatest asset in making war. The industrial plants which served it have been scarred and smashed by the devastating assaults of the Allied Air Forces. Ihese have been grievous losses, but there is a third element in German defence which still remains basically intact: the railway system running Irom, the English Channel to the Black Sea. Il is against this system that the main weight of Allied air power must be directed if the Soviet offensive in the east and the Allied invasion in the west are to bring about the military downfall of Germany this year.

In spite ol greatly increased use of trucks and tracked transport it is upon the railways that armies depend for the movement of heavy equipment. Outnumbered and in many cases outfought, German generals have been able to maintain a steady, if not particularly brilliant, defensive campaign in the east through the use of a few railways running par&llel with the front. Now’ that the Allies are on French soil, it is probable that the intricate system of railways serving France, Belgium and Holland will be one of the few advantages Germany will be able to exploit temporarily. German plans for holding the Allied invasion are based on these railways, for along them will move not only what troop reinforcements waning German power can supply, but what materials have been salvaged from German industry' over the past 18 months in which a maximum bombing effort has been directed against the territory of the Reich. The extent of these railways must be recognised if a true assessment of the difficulties confronting the Anglo-American armies in invasion is to be reached. In France alone there were, before the outbreak of war, 26,000 miles of railways with a yearly capacity of 627,500 passengers and 27,200 tons of freight. The most important lines in the network of railway communications in western Europe are, from the Allied strategic viewpoint, those which connect German industrial centres and training depots with the chief railway junctions of France, Belgium, Holland and smaller railways running to and parallel with the coast from the Bay of Biscay to the Skaggerak. These railways will be the principal routes for German reinforcements moving toward the most important beachheads.

While the vast European railway system affords the Germans a chance of prolonging the war, the entire railway network is within comparatively easy reach of heavy British and American bondvers, and in the east and on the south-eastern fronts its main junction are open to medium bombing. Writing recently in the Ae/c York Times, Drew Middleton said: “The entire system is so large, there are so many alternative routes for each one now damaged by bombing. railways, even sidings, offer so difficult a target, that claims that the system already has been ‘crippled’ or ■paraly sed’ or that one important network has been knocked out are ridiculous. In the west, for instance, it will take many weeks, perhaps months, of intensive bombing to do cither. So far as western Europe is concerned, full weight of Allied air power may not be exerted against German communications until the Luftwaffe’s first-line lighter strength has suffered so heavily that it can no longer oppose relatively small formations of Allied bombers directed against single targets such as railway junctions. Considering the German fortress as a whole, it is probable that the western Allies will have done more damage to immediate German communications by the time they arc ready to invade than the Russians have done since the beginning of the eastern war.’’