"We Must Be Prepared"

The Battle of France was as good as lost, and the Germans admitted it. In addition to whining unofficial talk about "harsh or mild peace terms," the Berlin radio broadcast a chill War Ministry statement : "We must be prepared for a German withdrawal from France. We must expect the loss of places with world-famous names."

Adolf Hitler's newspaper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, said it was "out of the question" to send reinforcements to France.

In southern France the Allied fist had struck deep into a surprisingly flabby belly. For weeks the Germans had seen the blow coming. Committed first to meeting the threat from the Normandy beachhead, they waited for the blow from the Mediterranean as if rooted in helpless fascination.

Loose at the Seams. A persistent lateral stretching of the fighting front is a painful business for an enemy holding undermanned positions. In the east, the Russians had pulled the Germans apart at the seams by extending the active front from a 200-mile jump-off line around Vitebsk to the present long reach between the Baltic and the Carpathians. The Anglo-U.S. armies could not do this on the narrow Italian peninsula. But they could do as well by an over-water leap to France, bypassing the Gothic Line and the Alps. In effect, this created a two-sectored southern front with the left flank free for unlimited movement.

It was high time--in fact, long past time--for wholesale Nazi withdrawals. Since the Normandy invasion, the Wehrmacht had probably lost, in killed or captured on all fronts, roughly 1,000,000 men. Of the 185 divisions with which the Germans began the summer in Russia, Allied intelligence officers have written off 40% of the effective strength.

Of the 60 divisions which Hitler had in France and the Low Countries three months ago, 15 have been destroyed. 15 badly mauled; the rest are in peril. East, west and south, the Allies will probably cut down many more divisions before finally contracting their grip on the central Nazi fortress.

Quagmire and Abattoir. "Withdrawal from France" was a grim phrase, for official German utterance. The prospects of actually withdrawing the remaining German forces were grimmer still. France was now a quagmire as well as an abattoir. The German Seventh Army, foolishly reinforced by elements of the Fifteenth which had been guarding the robot-bomb coast, was pinned against the Seine, under a withering blast of Allied fire from the ground and air.

Everywhere French patriot armies were rising, to fight the invader in his rear, to help Allied air fleets paralyze his movements. General Brereton's airborne army of 250,000 men was still a hovering menace that might swoop to cut any line of retreat anywhere. It could be used to speed the juncture of the Seventh Army in Provence with the forces before Paris. It might be dropped beyond Paris to slash the German escape route--or be set down in Germany beyond the Belfort Gap to speed an advance into Germany at the Swiss-border hinge of the Siegfried Line--or used to blaze the advance of the combined Allied Armies on north Germany along the coastal plane--the route by which Germany had invaded France twice in this century.

Dreary Epilogue? Were Nazi babblings of "peace terms" and "withdrawal" a smokescreen?--another desperate stall for time? One thing was certain. Hitler & Co. were still on top, arid so long as they stayed on top there could be no peace. Heinrich Himmler was preparing a fanatical home army to fight the final battle between the Oder and the Rhine, and to fight on as guerrillas after the last battle was lost. The Allies, east and west, needed to get into Germany as soon as possible, to upset these preparations before they became effective. Otherwise the war might drag on for dreary months of skirmishing and mopping up. After so much high drama, the Allied world had no stomach for a dreary epilogue.

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