European Front

ON THE WORLD TODAY

HOW long will Germany be able to withstand fullscale invasion assault from the West? Hitler’s ability to resist is now more than ever dependent on his ability to concentrate adequate forces where they are needed. This process is becoming progressively more difficult.

Casualty lists of the Wehrmacht for the winter just ended drew orders from the High Command for a new “levy of desperation" — the second in less than a year. Losses since the summer of 1943 exceed the total of last year’s emergency draft. Every male in the Third Reich from fifteen to sixty, not already in the army, falls within the new canvass. Children are being fed into German industries to release more men. Contingents of Poles, Czechs, and other subject peoples are being injected into the Wehrmacht, which once scorned them as “inferior.” Reports from the eastern front show that many of these desert.

The air score

1.The crippling of the Luftwaffe leaves the Wehrmacht without sufficient fighting cover on every battle front in Europe. Approximately half the firstline fighter strength of the Reich has been smashed.

2.By adding Lend-Lease planes to her own swelling production, Russia has achieved air superiority over the whole eastern front.

3.In the West, the growth of the Allied air strength based in Britain is attested by the fact that the American bombing fleet there is now larger than its British partner.

4.In the South (where Hitler has overridden the advice of Rommel and undertaken to convert the Italian campaign into another of his familiar “stand and die” adventures), the swift accumulation of German air strength fails to close the gap of Allied superiority and accelerates the Luftwaffe losses.

5. The battered industrial heart of the Third Reich, long open to blows from the West and South, is now dangerously exposed from the East. Every war industry which the Nazis have moved to Eastern Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia lies within range of heavy bombers from Russia, based no farther from pulverized Berlin than bombers flying from England. Skoda’s turn is coming up. Prague and the industrial concentrations near-by — which make up Germany’s greatest war production center after Berlin — are almost 100 miles closer to the approaching Russians than is the German capital.

6. The majority of the Nazi plane factories have been reduced to rubble, thanks to the remarkable step-up of precision bombing made possible by a godsend of good weather. Large transfers of ground personnel from the Luftwaffe to combat divisions have been revealed by analysis of the types of prisoners captured on three fronts.

Bread and manganese

Russia’s triumphant winter campaign, which is now slowing in the annual spring thaw, adds to the lengthening list of Germany’s deficits. Likewise it intensifies pressure upon German morale in many directions, from food to politics. Loss of the vast manganese supply centers at Nikopol and Krivoi Rog is a severe blow to the German war economy, now that Sweden has pared her exports to the Reich because of significant doubts as to Germany’s future ability to pay for them. Disruption of the supply route over which the Nazis imported Finnish nickel, copper, and cellulose is another consequence of the Red Army’s winter successes and of the renewed Russian naval and air patrol in the Finnish Gulf.

Germany’s diminishing foothold in the Western Ukraine is now as useless for economic purposes as it is hopeless for military advantage. That she will lose it long before another grain crop can ripen is certain. Indeed, the formidable Russian offensives north of Rumania in Poland west of the Dnieper and down the headwaters of the Bug threaten to snatch back into Russia’s hands what is left of this bread basket before sowing time ends. The subtraction represents a severe loss for the Reich. Steep reduction of food rations in Germany during February shows how quickly effect follows cause. Hitherto during the war Germany has eaten well. That is no longer true.

The plight of Finland and the advance of General Kutzov’s steamroller in Southeastern Poland are shaking Germany’s Balkan satellites from their last lingering doubts of approaching doom. Unlike Finland, not all of them are tangled in the problems of armed German occupation. In Hungary there are few German troops except for service and supply formations. Bulgaria, up to early March, was but partially garrisoned. Large areas of Rumania were similarly free of the Wehrmacht.

Insurrection, long expected and long delayed, now threatens each of the three as they seek to escape from the war while clinging to their loot. With Russian armies pressing toward the Balkans, this melee creates more hazards for the Germans. Hitler must hold the three Balkan states to protect his flank from the Russian challenge. Yet complete military occupation of all three would demand troops he cannot spare from other fronts. Moreover, if Germany attempts to seize Hungary, where she is roundly hated, she may face an inopportune and costly fight, with the prospect that a brand-new guerrilla army might soon be in the field against her.

Here come the Russians

No phenomenon of the war is more significant than the terror engendered among the German people by the nearer approach of the Russian armies. Cruelties practiced upon war prisoners and civilians in Russia by the German Wehrmacht are well known throughout Germany. Hitler’s government has even encouraged home folk to inflict similar brutalities on Russian war prisoners and upon the hundreds of thousands of civilian men, women, and girls kidnaped from Russian cities and villages into slavery.

More than a million and a half Russians are estimated to have died miserably in Germany and Poland since the summer of 1941 from this savage treatment. Even the tormented Poles have fared better. As the Russian armies hammer their way through the Baltic States and Poland, the German home front is afflicted with a fright obviously resulting from “consciousness of guilt.”

The first mutiny

For the first time since the war began, mutiny has appeared among German troops engaged in front operations. This is a partial explanation of the swift collapse of the powerful German siege position before Leningrad, which Hitler and the High Command considered impregnable. The imprisonment of the German commander of the whole area, the execution of three famous German field generals involved in this breakdown, the shooting of contingents of mutinous troops, the imprisonment of others in concentration camps, all show that the German High Command recognizes mutiny — the most insidious of all dangers besetting an unsuccessful army.

The troops involved were long inactive in fortifications which the Russian armies did not seriously menace until this past winter. Such situations generally impair morale. Whether any parallel exists between the mood of the Wehrmacht west of Leningrad three months ago and the mood of the defense garrisons manning the Atlantic Wall (which have been inactive much longer) remains to be seen.

What is important is the evidence of increasing dissension among officers in the Wehrmacht and questioning of Hitler’s orders by its ranking leaders. Here is the Achilles heel of the whole German war structure — as Himmler’s hasty visit to Latvia to mete out punishments indicates.

Can Germany dig in?

How do the Nazis expect to counter threats now raised by Russia from her brilliantly won vantage points in the Baltic States and approaches to Eastern Poland? How stay the avalanches accumulated above Lwow and the Eastern Carpathians, where the last rail supply line from Germany to Southwestern Russia and the main trunk line into Rumania from the North have been neutralized?

How can the Germans block the tidal wave surging toward the Balkans? Germany is heavily outnumbered on the eastern front in every sector of strategic importance. To complicate matters for her, though Russia’s immense reserves are yet uncommitted, Josef Stalin releases news of still another host whose training approaches completion. Clearly, this unsuspected — and to the Germans unwelcome — addition to Russian might must be faced in the coming grand Allied offensive.

There are hints that the Nazis may try to meet some of these problems with a fundamental change in tactics. To stabilize the eastern and southern fronts in time to permit a swinging of forces westward against invasion from Britain has been Hitler’s hope and dream all winter. That obsession lies at the root of his familiar and monotonous “stand and die” orders to his generals in both Russia and Italy. Defense in depth has failed to halt the Red armies. Yet unless the Russians can be held, the sweep of invasion from the West cannot be blocked either. It is both dikes or none.

The Nazis plan to try trench warfare as a possible answer. Russian intelligence, operating through the guerrillas, is turning up evidence that defenses along the Riga-Lwow line are being supplemented by elaborate trench systems. The Germans apparently hope to make Russian break-throughs, flanking sweeps, and by-passing moves more difficult by presenting a continuous line.

The experiment is ingenious; but will it work? The long stalemate in World War I in Western Europe was, it is true, tangled in trench warfare. But there were few airplanes in that struggle, and none of them remotely compared with the aerial armadas now functioning. There was no air-borne infantry. There were also few tanks. Mechanized armies did not exist. Armored divisions were unheard of. Will trench warfare stand up today, even when developed around the famous German defense-in-depth system?

Himmler against the guerrillas

The gravity of the military problems accumulating for the German High Command is deepened by the sharpening tone of underground activities throughout the Continent. Hitler has acknowledged the operations of these silent fighters by dispatching Himmler on a grand tour to Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, France, and the states of the Baltic East.

Himmler’s mission is to improve and enlarge the organization of the German terror in every subject nation where invasion impends. Quislings and their collaborators have instituted new special police forces to aid the German authorities. Nearly five thousand Gestapo agents, all experts on combating sabotage, have poured into little Denmark from Czechoslovakia.

Yet efforts of the Germans to throttle opposition make slow progress. Underground formations multiply attacks. Sabotage reaches tremendous proportions. Executions of informers and collaborators occur daily. In Paris the toll of these gentry is now two a day.

Robin Hoods at large

The rapid growth of guerrilla forces is an important recent sign of deteriorating German control on the Continent. This explains why Himmler’s tour is followed by explosions of regional civil war from France to the Baltic States, and why the Nazis must draw police details from Germany for reinforcement. Belgium’s guerrilla army finds shelter in the fabulous forest of the Ardennes — habitat of outlaw bands since the Middle Ages. Several expeditions to eliminate these forces have failed. According to the Nazis themselves, the Ardennes guerrillas constitute an “ International Brigade.” Their ranks include escaped Russian prisoners from the Belgian mines, Senegalese and Moroccan French soldiers, as well as thousands of Belgians. Organized under experienced officers, the Brigade possesses motor transport, a communications system, rifles, small field guns, and even some uniforms.

The guerrillas in France, comprising a sizable portioa of French underground formations, are officially numbered at nearly 200,000, though that figure is probably too high. A small army of them is fighting a war to the death among the forests and mountains of Haute-Savoie against a powerful expeditionary force of Vichy Mobile Police commanded by the notorious Joseph Darnand, lately named by Laval to direct destruction of resistance cadres. M. Darnand’s efforts are impaired, however, by police desertions to the outlaws.

Poland’s guerrillas are numerous and rove over the south and central areas of the countryside. Strategic position provides this army with magnificent opportunities for harassing German supply lines. The tough and daring Polish fighters include thousands of trained railway wreckers. Their sudden descents upon German garrisons, prison camps, and trains, and their ingenious system of issuing fake orders to occupying officials, keep the administrations of several provinces in continual confusion.

On his visit to the Baltic States, Himmler conceived the idea of organizing local detachments of natives to fight the guerrillas. His argument was that they were to protect their own property from “the bolsheviks.” The result has been contrary to his purpose. Between 60 and 70 per cent of the able-bodied Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians have fled “into the bush ” to join Russian-directed guerrillas already operating there.

Some of these bands are said to number as many as a thousand. Their ranks are swollen by rescued Russian prisoners, and their arms are provided by ambushing German supply trains and convoys, and by raiding dumps. The efficiency of the Baltic guerrillas is attested by official praise from Moscow, and by the complaint from German headquarters that the loss of one of the key positions on the eastern front was occasioned by the severance of supply lines in the rear by outlaw bands. A whole brigade of Czech guerrillas lately enrolled in Marshal Tito’s army in the Balkans. The reconciliation of the two guerrilla factions in Greece bodes more trouble for the Germans.