How To Lose the War

The men with the clearest view of the war and its immediate future in Europe this week were Adolf Hitler and the members of his military staffs. They knew, of course, that they had lost the war. They, if anyone, also knew what their enemies in Moscow, London, Washington and Algiers could not precisely know: just how Nazi Germany now proposes to meet its end.

Would they choose the quick end of 1918, saving what they could for recovery and yet another war? Or would they choose an end delayed to the last moment, the last shot, the last inch of territory outside the Reich--and to the last bomb on the last city of Germany? There were many indications that Hitler and his men had made the second choice, with some important reservations. Upon their choice, as much as upon Allied strategy, would depend the course and tempo of the war in its final European phase.

A Plan for Defeat. Hitler told the Germans that they must be willing to swap some of their conquered territory for military security. This statement was not merely an alibi for retreat. It was a clue to Germany's strategy of defeat.

The idea of Festung Europa--a continent to be held everywhere, at any cost--was probably never much more than propaganda, and it began to fade months ago. There were reports that the Germans planned to leave most of Italy and Yugoslavia, all of Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Crete and their Mediterranean islands outside their main line of continental defense. An inner fortress, to be held as a last barrier around the Reich, would include northern Italy and Yugoslavia, Hungary, Rumania, and a Russian front running through eastern Poland. But, said these reports, the Germans would surrender lower Italy and the other outlands only after the fiercest rearguard fighting.

Hitler's words fitted this conception. So did the Sicilian campaign. So, last week, did the early stages of the defense of Italy, where German resistance was weakest in the extreme south, strongest at the northern points of attack. And so, insofar as they could be seen, did events and circumstances in the southern Balkans.

Area of Doubt. German communiques said, with fierce insistence, that the situation in the Balkans was well in German hands. They said that the estimated 34 Italian divisions in the Balkans were being peaceably disarmed and replaced by German divisions. They said that the Italians, bidden by British Lieut. General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson to "turn out the Germans," were making trouble only in "minor instances."

Cairo, the Allies' center of Balkan information, flatly disbelieved the German accounts. Military informants there doubted that the Germans had, or could find, enough troops to replace the Italians, or that the Germans could long control both the Italians and millions of restive Greeks, Albanians, Yugoslavs, Cretans, Bulgarians.

The Nazis' one asset was the Italian commander in the Balkans, General Carlo Vecchiarelli, who is violently anti-Ally. But General Vecchiarelli can do little, and he might even go with the tide, if some 400,000 Italian soldiers turn actively against the Germans.

Apart from any predetermined strategy, a secure Allied position in Italy must eventually make the lower Balkans untenable for the Germans. In southern Italy, the Allies have already outflanked the Germans in the southern Balkans and destroyed most of Crete's value as a base guarding the Mediterranean approaches. Crete was formidable when it lay between the Allies in North Africa and the Germans in southeastern Europe. Now the Allies are behind Crete. Military men in Cairo expect that island, once a symbol of German triumph and might, to fall "like a ripe apple."

From airdromes and ports already seized in southern Italy, bombers and warships can harry the Germans in Greece. Retreat northward, or a stand which in the end can gain them little, are the alternatives. If Albania falls to the Allies, Greece will become a trap for any Germans who remain.

Nazi prospects in Yugoslavia are better, and they are improved the farther north the Germans look. To outflank Yugoslavia, as Greece and Crete are already outflanked, the Allies must take most of German-held Italy. Last week the Germans said that strong troop concentrations had moved on to the Yugoslav coast of the Adriatic. These reports had a ring of truth. On that coast, at its few practicable points of entry,, the Germans can hope to gain time and inflict heavy losses in a profitable rear-guard-stand. It is there, if anywhere, that they must hold a gate to their inner fortress--and fight to bar the British and Americans from a junction with the Russians.

The Turks must have weighed these factors as carefully as the Germans did. If they would, the Turks could now give the Allies a flanking position in the east to match the western position in Italy. If they would, the Turks could rob the Germans of all the time that they now hope to gain by resistance in northern Italy and Yugoslavia. For, with a free entry through Turkey, the Allies could establish a front in Bulgaria, attack the Rumanian hinge of the inner fortress, deprive the Germans of Ploesti's oil, threaten their armies in southern Russia from the rear.

Area of Despair. At best, any German plan of inner defense must be a plan of despair:

>No scheme, no delay on the ground fronts can save Germany from air attack on a scale which will dwarf all that the Germans have suffered to date. Sooner or later Italy--and surrendered Corsica--will provide bases for a southern air offensive coordinated with multiplied assault from Britain. Then, under the impact of defeats and bombs, the German people may have something to say about Hitler's choice.

> The Germans must find some line, in Poland or in western Russia, where they can hope to hold the Red Army. Geography is against them. Nowhere, no matter how often or how drastically they may "shorten the line," can they find a line that is really short, or really safe.

> In western and northern Europe, the Germans have no buffer lands to trade for time, or for a tenuous, temporary security. Occupied Denmark and Norway lie between Britain and the coast of north eastern Germany. But they are no places for rear-guard economy; they are places to be held as strongly and fiercely as the Germans would fight for their own coast. For, if they fall, the inner fortress will have been breached.

> At Boulogne, the port of northern France chosen for a pre-invasion test last week, the Germans are only 200 mi. from the Reich. For all military purposes, Belgium, The Netherlands and the Channel coast of France are walls of the inner fortress. On that coast last week, not a Nazi gun spoke when a British troop convoy hove within sight and range. Airmen sweeping northwestern France got the impression that both ground and aerial defenses were astoundingly weak; London heard that the Germans had withdrawn 13 of their 34 divisions from western France and the Lowlands. Either the Nazis had laid a masterful trap, or the western wall had become, since Dieppe, a gigantic shell. Reported a TIME correspondent in London:

"A second front on the Channel now seems possible months earlier than it has ever seemed before. Many who believed that a second front in the West was coming only in the springtime of 1944 now believe it is coming much sooner."

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