World Battlefronts, THE WAR: Last Chance before Winter

Around the defense perimeter, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and back to the North Sea, the quality of German resistance was spotty.

In Lithuania, where they had held a stabilized line for months, the Germans suddenly caved in before a massive Soviet assault which carried most of the way to the Lithuanian coast and the north border of East Prussia.

In the Balkans they stood fast on some sectors, ran fast on others. But they were not generally disorganized or suffering great casualties. In Italy they obdurately contested every yard of the Allied advance toward Bologna; it seemed as if they were fighting this battle, so far from home, more for the sake of their tattered prestige than for strategic gain.

On the western front, where Allied spearheads had pierced the fatherland, the Germans fought in fierce gusts of frenzy, and with high military skill. The U.S. First Army held the spotlight on this front, as it widened and deepened its salient north of Aachen. The aim was for a breakthrough that would sweep the Germans back to the Rhine—but the pace was grinding and generally slow. For the time, at least, it was a painful battle of attrition. At several points west of the Rhine, the German counterattacks forced the Allies to back up, to grope for new footing for the next plunge ahead. The U.S. Seventh Army slugged it out at Belfort, the Third at Metz, the British at Nijmegen, the Canadians on the coast.

The Stout Defense. Allied military sources credited the Nazis with 40 full-strength divisions—about 600,000 men—stretched along the 500-mile front from Switzerland to the North Sea. Eisenhower’s men outnumbered them at least threefold, perhaps fivefold. Moreover, fewer than half the German units were first-class troops. Many of those holding fixed positions in the West Wall were barrel-scrapings : convalescents, striplings, oldsters, men with stomach trouble, ear trouble, eye trouble—even chronic alcoholics.

But the German counterattacks were mounted by topnotch fighting outfits, which furnished enough cohesion to keep the whole wall from crumbling. Substandard soldiers, as well as good soldiers, seemed to draw strength from the “holy soil” and the well-fitted defenses.

The Frankfurt radio announced last week that the first units of the Volksgrenadiere—Heinrich Himmler’s Home

Army—had gone into action on the western front.

If Winter Comes. The cold rains had stopped and the autumn sun was shining on Paris when General George C. Marshall, War Mobilization Director Jimmy Byrnes and their party stepped put of an Army C-54 transport which had flown nonstop from the U.S. They were met by Generals Eisenhower, Bradley and “Beedle” Smith, Eisenhower’s crack chief of staff. Marshall and Eisenhower were solemn as they shook hands. They did not, of course, tell correspondents what they would confer about. One obvious guess: winter on the western front.

Marshall and Eisenhower still had two-thirds of October in which to try for a quick knockout—or. for a paralyzing blow which could be exploited even in the fogs and mud of November. As a rule, October in northern Europe has a fair amount of clear and sunny weather. In October 1918 the Allies enjoyed good weather for their final campaigns against the Kaiser’s Germany. When the sun came out last week, Allied air power delivered the heaviest blows of the whole war against strategic targets, dropping 30,000 tons of bombs in three thunderous days on oil plants, on factories making airplane engines, tanks, trucks, locomotives, and on communication centers. The tactical fleets brought sorely needed support to the ground armies.

If bad weather ruins the rest of October, bogging down armor, grounding planes and aggravating the Allies’ already tremendous supply problems, Germany’s chances of surviving the winter will look better than at any time since the Normandy breakout. Even so, nobody will hand her a gilt-edged certificate positively guaranteeing that she can fight on into 1945.