Ike's Classic

Almost exactly as he had planned it, months before, Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower's defeat of the German armies in the west came up to its final phase last week. Few historic campaigns have gone according to their advance blueprints, but the battles in which the main body of the enemy's forces west and east of the Rhine were clawed apart followed the original Eisenhower pattern almost to the letter.

"Ike" Eisenhower had won a classic victory, one of history's greatest. By this week it had taken his main forces into the heart of Germany for the fatal thrusts. But the measure of the victory was back in the Ruhr basin. There last week the last cohesive resistance died; Dusseldorf fell. The bag of prisoners was astonishing: more than 317,000. There was no complete count of the enemy dead; the total would probably be more than 25.000. Thus the Ruhr had yielded a greater harvest of annihilation than the Russians' tide-turning triumph at Stalingrad, with its total of 330,000 killed and captured.

At Supreme Headquarters, Ike's Chief of Staff, trim, brilliant Lieut. General Walter Bedell ("Beedle") Smith, summed up the Ruhr victory: "The largest double envelopment in military history."

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