West: A Smart War

Last week General Eisenhower reached a pregnant point in his career. He was still very, very busy collecting royalties from his last smash hit in Normandy; and doubly busy--putting on a new production that would make or break his season.

Royalties. Eisenhower's collection of royalties last week showed that the Allies were still fighting a smart war. The biggest single collection took place at Mons. There, by the shrewd tactic of conducting a pursuit not from behind the enemy--who could delay it by dropping off rear guards--but beside the enemy on parallel roads, General Hodges' First American Army succeeded in destroying the biggest part of the Nazi rear guard.

Another smart move of General Hodges --pushing two columns forward to threaten Liege and then cutting the city off from behind by a third column--cut up another German division, captured a thousand prisoners, killed one general and captured another without a real fight.

Other royalties were collected by Lieut. General Patch's northbound Seventh Army, which pushed the Germans hard on the retreat which they had no choice of making because of Eisenhower's success in northern France.

"Sandy" Patch exacted terrible losses from the enemy, in his four-week pursuit up the Rhone and Doubs to the Belfort Gap, where he made junction with the U.S. Third Army. The Germans lost an estimated 60,000 in western France who never had a chance to fight.

Eisenhower also began to collect royalties in the air. His ground victories, long aided by air supremacy, now freed the airforce from its long task of dumping heavy loads on occupied territory, including the robomb coast. Bombers and fighters in the west now concentrated on Germany itself. Day & night, railroad centers behind the West Wall and industries in central Germany took 1,000-plane doses of bad medicine--all the bad medicine which western Europe had previously had to share. Over Leipzig, while 1,000 bombers bashed oil plants, 800 U.S. fighters got a record battle's bag of 175 German planes. In two days of good hunting fighters destroyed 262 planes aground, 34 aloft.

Rape of the Rhine Maidens. Every royalty that Eisenhower collected on his last show improved the prospects for his next production--a heroic opera about the breaking of the Siegfried Line and the rape of the Rhine Maidens. The curtain was lifting--Courtney Hodges'troops were on German soil.

The West Wall is formidable enough in dragon-toothed antitank traps, in a multiplicity of small cross-firing forts, in a checkered labyrinth of woods and blockhouses, in roads dead-ended at gun range. But it is not designed to stop an enemy in his tracks. It is designed to exhaust an enemy who breaks into it, so that fresh reserves, using the classic Prussian defense by counterattack, can rush in and hurl him back.

For this sort of defense, any Hitler youth, any old garrison service corpsman, any dummkopf may be able to stand in a concrete pillbox and press a trigger, till he is killed. But to make the West Wall effective, 30 to 45 divisions are needed, and a good proportion of them must be first-rate troops for counterattacking.

The question of how hard or how early the West Wall is to break depends on manpower. Last week's victories at Mons and Liege helped to cut off several divisions which the Germans had undoubtedly counted on.

The Germans may have had about 20 divisions available last week in the West Wall and its approaches, perhaps ten more that can get back from the Low Countries. Perhaps six or eight more succeeded in retiring from southern France to the Belfort Gap; and perhaps ten divisions were available from Himmler's reserve army.

This guesstimate would give the Germans 48 divisions -- but most of them under strength and some of them disorganized.

With such forces the Nazis must hold a line almost eight times as long as Rom mel's original front in Normandy (where at the height of battle they had 30 divisions).

The question of whether the Germans can put up an effective defense depends on how much time they have. Given enough time, they may be able to bring several divisions from Finland and Norway, and even from the Balkans. With time they can assemble more second-grade cannon fodder to stuff their pillboxes. Last week the process was already under way.

At Hasselt, an important road junction in Belgium, where units of the U.S. First joined forces with the British Second Army, the British reported that they had found: 1) troops hurriedly brought down from Denmark; 2) fanatic youths, 17 and 18 years old, who had been training as Luftwaffe pilots in Holland until a fortnight ago.

In France the remnants of crack SS divisions were given priority over all the others in the flight to the West Wall.

Germany was arming service troops and medical corpsmen, sending them into combat (Joseph Goebbels had reportedly done away with the German Red Cross).

Nazi Chief of Staff Heinz Guderian pleaded for volunteers from the Hitler-jugend (boys 14 to 17 years). The propaganda radio bleated: "Thousands of fanatic Hitler youths are moving up to the front." For Producer Eisenhower the problem was to get his cast and props on the spot at once. The Germans clinging to the ports of France were spending their lives to delay him. Eisenhower's drives were already in operation at a fantastic distance of 400 to 550 miles from Cherbourg and the nearby beaches, the fount of his supplies. If he were to attack quickly he would have to have miracles from his service of supply.

Late Men. When Field Marshal Heinz Guderian took charge of the Wehrmaoht (TIME, Aug. 7), he had to draft reserves available for the west to bolster the German east front. Last week Guderian had to draft a field marshal from the east, where he had stopped the Russians before Warsaw, to try to stem the Allied tides in the west. The new oberbefehlshaber was stocky, monocled, 53-year-old Walter von Model (rhymes with yodel), popular in Germany, a Hitler-Himmler favorite as well. Model threw his energies into putting up a stiff delaying action on the Moselle River, to gain time. General Patton's Third Army crossed the Moselle last week but suffered heavy losses doing it, cleared a long section of the Maginot forts, found many of its eastward-pointed guns still operable.

But Model himself also got a rousing welcome on that front: tankmen of the Third Army broke into a village, captured some of his staff officers, found Model's headquarters chair still warm.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.