Whose Initiative?

That was the question: who had the initiative last week on the western front? The Germans had it in Alsace, the British had it in the north. Nobody had it in the Ardennes, where the Germans were successfully evacuating the last of their armor and crack infantry, and where the U.S. was successfully liquidating the German bulge.

Squeeze on Strasbourg. Liberated France, cold, hungry and disillusioned, waited tensely for news as the threat to her beloved Strasbourg increased from day to day. At Gambsheim, eleven miles north of Strasbourg, the Germans beefed up their bridgehead with men and tanks from across the Rhine. From it, they struck north, west and south. On the north, they joined with other Nazi units attacking Hatten--a village whose shell-torn, fire-blackened ruins had been fought over for more than a week--and thus established a front from Gambsheim clear across to the Lorraine salient south of Bitche. The blow to the west drove the U.S. Seventh Army back five miles. Then the Germans shoved south to a point nine miles from Strasbourg.

From the big Colmar pocket south of Strasbourg, the Germans had already probed within ten miles of the city. Thus, in their 19-mile strip of the Rhine's west bank, the French defenders of Strasbourg were squeezed on both sides. At week's end the French in the Belfort-Mulhouse area attempted a diversion by smacking the Colmar pocket's broad southern flank. Launched in a heavy snowstorm, this attack cut a deep gash in the enemy lines before it was slowed.

The Germans wanted Strasbourg for its prestige value; the Allies wanted to hold it for the same reason. Strategically it was not worth a heavy commitment of reserves. But Major General Jean Delattre de Tassigny promised a last-ditch defense.

Holding the Funnels. The Ardennes bulge dwindled to a strip which reached only twelve miles into Belgium at the widest point, east of Houffalize. The Germans evacuated their funnel at Houffalize, which had served its purpose, but seemed determined to hold the funnel at Saint-Vith for a few days longer. Clearing weather enabled Allied tactical pilots to take a last crack at German vehicles, of which they destroyed more than 1,000. On the south, General Patton's onrushing Third Army came within range of German guns firing from the casemates of the Westwall itself.

The Germans' 10th and 9th Armored Divisions, which had spearheaded the Ardennes offensive, suddenly reappeared in other sectors--one in the battle for Strasbourg, the other on the Third Army's front, south of Trier.

In the north last week General Sir Miles C. Dempsey's British Second Army launched an attack on the German salient between Roermond and Geilenkirchen. This appeared to be no more than a line-straightening operation, to bring the British up to the Roer, in line with the U.S. Ninth and First Army positions. Yet Dempsey's white-painted tanks and white-clad infantry advanced seven miles in three days, swept up a dozen villages, beat down with flamethrowers a counterattack by Nazi paratroops.

Bradley Resumes. SHAEF censors passed a dispatch hinting that General Omar Bradley had resumed command of his northern armies (relinquished to Field Marshal Montgomery after the German breakthrough), and there was another hint in the fact that Bradley last week pinned a decoration on Lieut. General Courtney Hodges, the First Army's commander. But Bradley was in no shape to resume his November offensive on the Roer. The western front was once more a battle for time--on both sides. Supreme Commander Eisenhower had to rebuild his offensive platforms as quickly as possible. The Germans had to continue delaying him as long as possible, while they dealt, as best they could, with the enormous emergency created by the Russians in the east.

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