Professionals at Work

On more than one occasion Winston Churchill has paid his derisive respects to the strategy of "Corporal Hitler" by listing it among the Allies' greatest assets. Addressing the House of Commons last week, the Prime Minister soberly refrained from any such sarcasm--for, whatever the reason for Hitler's eclipse, his meddling and whimsical hand was no longer in evidence on the western front.

Correspondents quoted a "high" U.S. officer who has closely studied the German operations since Dday: "If Hitler were running the Army now, he would probably be screaming to his generals to retake Aachen by 6 o'clock tonight, instead of allowing them to conduct the highly skilled defense they are making. . . . The use the Germans have made of the past two months to recover, and their remarkable resurgence of military power, show no amateur is now in charge, but shrewd professional soldiers."

Under Field Marshal Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt, the classic Junker who is generally regarded as Germany's ablest soldier, Field Marshal Walter Model was commanding in the north, and General Hermann Balck in the south. Model was personally decorated by Hitler last summer for stopping the Russians at the Vistula. Balck had shown defensive ability in the Ukraine, and after the Allied invasion of southern France he succeeded in bringing the remnants of his Panzer corps back to Germany. Now, wherever possible, Model and Balck are sacrificing substandard troops to save good ones. At sensitive spots they still counterattack with great force and frequency.

The Enemy Fights. During their two months' respite, when the Allied push across France had run out of breath and fuel, the German commanders succeeded in piecing together an estimated 70 divisions, ranging in quality from the Volksgrenadiere (only a cut or two above the home-guard Volkssturm) to the pampered Elite Guards outfits. The divisions, many of which are far under strength, average about 10,000 men each. Latest reports indicate that 50 to 55 divisions were holding the lines when the big Allied drive started last month, with 15 or 20 of the best backing them up.

German morale varies sharply from one outfit to another, but it is generally high. Second-rate troops now fight with the same effectiveness as the Wehrmacht's best in the battle of France. Even where there is a ready disposition to give up, surrender is difficult because of fanatical Nazi officers' iron control. The average German soldier knows that he has the weather and the fortifications on his side. And he is, as Churchill pointed out, spurred on by the same "supreme stimulus" which so strengthened Britain in the dark days of 1940-41--i.e., the defense of a beloved homeland.

The fighting last week was violent, especially in the bloody, muddy vortex of the Cologne plain. One U.S. officer called it "the hardest and most costly fighting I have ever seen, worse than anything in the last war." For security reasons the extent of U.S. casualties was veiled, but it was known that at least three divisions had been badly mauled. Correspondents in Paris reported the arrival of "heavily loaded" hospital trains.

The Hopeful Fact. By tradition the attack should suffer more casualties than the defense. Yet there was reason to believe that in this battle the Germans were losing more heavily than the Allies. On the U.S. First Army's front alone, four German divisions were written off as "destroyed," and two more went to the rear for replenishment. On all sectors, since the offensive's start in early November, some 65,000 German prisoners had been taken. If an equal number had been killed or wounded (a conservative estimate), then the Germans had lost the equivalent of a dozen divisions in less than a month.

Thus, for all their skillful tactics, the German armies were being ground up. That was the hopeful, insistent fact that loomed over the toe-to-toe slugging of the western front. But Mr. Churchill refused to speak hopefully last week, saying that no man knew when the war would end, that he preferred to remove the word "early" from his previous guess that it would end in "early summer."

"I must warn the House and the country," the Prime Minister said, "against any indulgence in feeling that the war will soon be over. It may be, but. . . ."

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