Not By Arithmetic

On the western front, from Arnhem to Switzerland, the battle had reached a stage close to stalemate, where some new factor seemed due to be injected and soon.

After nearly a month of cruel and costly fighting, the U.S. First Army's line, inching up to the Roer River, was just twelve miles east of Aachen--which was taken four weeks before the offensive started.

The Germans suffered their worst pangs last week in the Saar, where the blast furnaces* were under paralyzing shell fire from the advancing Third Army (see below). But the struggle for the Saar was beginning to resemble the bloody infighting of the Cologne plain.

Last week SHAEF officially estimated the German casualties for the last three weeks of November at 152,000--nearly a quarter of the total German strength in the west. By simple arithmetic, it would seem that General Eisenhower had only to keep his armies butting against the wall for another five or six weeks to reduce Nazi resistance in the west to impotence. But before any result could be achieved by such primal methods, he would probably be faced with exhaustion and loss of morale in his own troops, despite his massive reserves. The enemy knew that the arithmetic of a coarse slugging match worked both ways, and the keystone of his strategy was to exact such a price as to discourage the Allied effort. Thus, to continue bulling ahead on the lines of recent weeks would be playing the enemy's game. That was not Eisenhower's way.

Up the Sleeve. In the Nijmegen-Arnhem salient, which the fearful Germans had flooded by opening the Waal dikes, General Crerar's Canadians, rested from the hellish battle of the Scheldt Estuary had wheeled into line again alongside the British. An all-out British-Canadian thrust across the Maas, or against the Arnhem flank, might put almost intolerable pressure on the German reserves, ease the way for a new U.S. push on Cologne.

Meanwhile the Allied air effort to wall off the Rhineland battle arena from interior Germany continued in full force. Perhaps Eisenhower might wait until this process was further along (it can never be 100% complete), or until the Russians get going on the East Prussia-Poland front. But Eisenhower knew that what the enemy most wanted him to do was to wait. Surveying the Allied reserves, the Germans could conclude that he had no intention of accommodating them. Still up General "Ike's" sleeve was a potent threat--General Brereton's powerful airborne army. It was a fair assumption that in his reserve areas there were other divisions besides, waiting for the break.

* The Saar produces only about one-seventh as much iron & stel as the Ruhr.

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