Wall of Blood

The German Army last week acted like an army in defeat. Its every move was forced upon it, and each move at one point weakened it at some other point. Everywhere Germany was losing: at home, from the mightiest air assault in history; in Russia; in southern Europe. It was there, from Sicily and Italy to their Cretan outpost, that the real nature of the Germans' plight was most apparent.

The Chain. Germany had the troops to send to chosen points. Reinforcements still arrived in Sicily. Into northern Italy, above the River Po, other Germans moved from Austria, from Yugoslavia, and possibly from southern Italy, which the Germans patently did not expect to hold. From the area of Udine and Venice they spread west almost to Milan. Nazi troops also concentrated in the upper Adriatic's Istrian peninsula, where the late Poet Gabriele d'Annunzio seized Fiume after World War I.

The Wehrmacht had troops for the Balkans, long driven by guerrillas and now likely to lose their Italian garrisons. Additional Germans moved in, to control, disarm and eventually to replace the Italians in Yugoslavia, Greece and the island of Crete (where, Cairo heard, Germans battled Italians last week. If anything, these movements probably meant that the Allies would find more determined opposition from the Germans than they would have found before the Italian defections.

But the availability of these troops did not mean that the German position was secure. The troops had to be drawn from the Wehrmacht's remaining strategic reserves. Every division taken from these reserves was one less for a time of final need in Russia, or for defense in western Europe, or for additional reinforcements, at the points the Allies actually chose for invasion in the south. The once invincible German Army was caught in a fateful chain of unhappy events and conflicting needs.

The Hope. The Germans seemed to know as much. Unable to hold all of Italy, they feebly hoped that Mussolini's successors might be able to prevent the use of Italian air, naval and troop bases for continental attack. The Allies, determined to have these bases, warned Italians that all-out air raids were near, and precipitated a mass exodus from Italian cities. Spanish Fascists in Berlin, newspaper correspondents who until lately had written of coming German offensives, cabled Madrid newspapers that the Germans were now in extrema defensa (a last stand)--and that Nazi militarists now talked of a "wall of blood" around the shaken Reich.

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