Phase in Logistics

Except in Russia, where artillery blazed and bayonets gleamed along a 2,000-mile front, the global war was in a stage of logistics (the transport, quartering and supply of troops). It seemed unearthly quiet, incredibly menacing, after the German's noisy, bloody advance across the steppes, after the Jap's swift dash past Manila and Singapore into the Indies.

It was quiet. But the outer supply routes of the world were athrong with ships, men and supplies : around the world's fat waist in the Indian Ocean and the south Pacific; around its chest in the Atlantic and north Pacific; around its neck above the Arctic Circle off Norway, in the Aleutian and Kuril Islands. The interior lines were jammed: jammed with soldiers moving up on German and Russian railroads and highways, jammed with little men slipping down the south China Sea and through the southern straits to the Indies and east toward India.

There was plenty of fighting. But it was largely a succession of thrusts against supply lines, rather than an attempt to take and hold enemy ground:

> British ships cruised in the swirling snowstorms and heavy mists of the North Sea, or crouched before Trondheim against the smash the Germans might make from Trondheim and Helgoland against the long artery to Murmansk and the Russian front.

> In the Atlantic, close to U.S. shores, German subs lanced the veins carrying supplies to the heart of Allied production, hoping always for the great chance that would give them a shot at the arteries carrying men and munitions from the U.S. to the front.

> In the south Pacific, the Jap halted in The Netherlands East Indies, partly because he had used up his momentum. Now he was busy with logistics, preparing his positions for new assaults--perhaps on India, perhaps on Australia, where for the moment he was outclassed.

> In the Mediterranean, the Nazis slammed at Malta and the Italians made bumble-footed assaults on British convoys. Objects: 1) to clear the Mediterranean for the movement of Axis troops; 2) to knock out British supply.

Spring had come to the temperate zones, and to man's logistic zeal the northern pathways were almost as free as the all-year highways and alleys of the south Pacific. One foe, windblown by his dash, was catching his wind while his supplies came up. Another, fighting through the winter in the greatest battle of history, had dredged his high schools for new soldiers and scraped the bottom of factories and food stores for their supplies. In Easter week, while the United Nations sped over vast distances to meet them, they were about ready to strike. In the long run, the best job of logistics would win.

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