"Hell of a Bang"

October was running out, and the October weather had been mostly bad. Low-lying meadows were spongy with waters; rivers and streams were rising. Aided by the weather and by the Allies' supply difficulties, the Germans fought to delay the big blow which they were sure was coming. The Allies fought to keep the enemy off balance, to keep him guessing, to keep his scanty reserves on the run.

Only intermittently did the weather hold back the Allied big bombers, which used their hidden-target instruments when necessary to unload through overcast. With Duisburg and Cologne temporarily shattered, the heavies turned their attention to Hamm, Bonn, Mainz, Wiesbaden, Stuttgart, Mannheim and other supply ganglia serving the West Wall. It was an effort to wall off the Rhineland from the interior--just as, in the Battle of France, Allied air power had isolated the fighting area between the Loire and the Seine.

General Eisenhower was obviously not settling down to winter battles of attrition, A staff officer in the British Second Army told correspondents that the Allied buildup was gaining strength every hour, soon there would be "a hell of a bang."

Most of the German strength in the west is now committed to the fighting lines. The longer the blow is delayed, the longer Hitler will have to scrape up and train his ersatz divisions, to toughen his defenses in depth. On the other hand, a real breakthrough might tear the present front hopelessly open, might furnish the momentum for the knockout wallop in the west.

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