Time for Pessimism?

Optimists who had forgotten that recent Allied advances were the payoff of a battle fought two months ago in Normandy were shocked last week to find the Germans putting up another fight. But the scare which the Wehrmacht threw into the Allies at Arnhem obscured the fact that last week was a bad week for the Wehrmacht.

Not only did the Germans lose two more campaigns--in the Baltic States and northern Italy--but on the western front they were fighting another battle which was going badly for them.

For at Arnhem, where the Allies had at stake the fate of perhaps 8,000 men, the Germans faced the loss of several times that number in western Holland, with the added prospect of having the Siegfried Line turned at its northern end, and the whole of north Germany laid open to invasion. At week's end it appeared that the greater part of the Allied stake would be saved and the greater part of the German stake would be lost.

Meanwhile on the western front the impoverished Wehrmacht was forced to spend, spend, spend.

P: Against the Allies massed along the Siegfried Line it threw itself into local counterblows. In one area against Lieut. General George S. Patton's Third Army it spent more than 200 tanks in such counterattacks. But, by this week, Patton's armor had found a weak spot at another point, had plunged ahead six miles.

P: Against Lieut. General Courtney H. Hodges' First Army, near Trier, enemy attacks pushed back one sharp wedge penetrating his "sacred soil." But by this week General Hodges had turned this local German success into futility: the Americans had thrust farther north and east at another point, stood only 18 miles from the Rhine.

This was the same sort of wastage that the German Army suffered during the early days of the battle of Normandy. The Wehrmacht was now being reinforced by the old, the young, the deaf, the wounded (only partially recuperated). Heinrich Himmler was organizing his home guards to back up the line. He also visited the front, ordered troops to dig new positions, to remain in them until killed or ordered to retreat.

Near Luxembourg the Allies found a purported Hitler staff document. It called on officers to save themselves at all costs: "An officer's salvation in retreat is in the interests of the country." (Lately there has been a low percentage of officers among prisoners taken.) There was other evidence that officer groups, cut off in Holland, were deserting their men, either to save themselves to lead an untried, last-ditch army of civilians and military misfits or to go underground to keep Naziism alive.

All this was disturbing to those who had hoped to see Germany fall without a fight. But for General Eisenhower, who was prepared to fight until Germany fell, it was good news. The enemy had been forced to take the measures of desperation--and already the battle of desperation had begun.

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