GERMAN STRENGTH

Dominion, Volume 36, Issue 27, 27 October 1942, Page 2

GERMAN STRENGTH

Beginning Of Gradual Exhaustion Seen

That “the period of gradual exhaustion for the enejny has started” was the belief expressed by General Wladyslaw SikorsW, Polish Prime Minister and Commander-In-Chief, in a broadcast to Poland on the third anniversary of Germany’s unprovoked aggression on Poland that began tbe second world war.

Asserting that the Dieppe raid had proved invasion of the Continent “absolutely feasible” and that the Allies, including the United States, were marshalling their forces in Britain, General Sikorski said of the Germans that the “repayment awaiting them in coining months for all their cruelties and destruction will be far greater” than the punishment they had already received. Since the initial German attack, General Sikorski said, German losses had reached 1,500,000 dead and 3,000,000 wounded i and ill, about 1,000,000 of whom would not return to the ranks, while the manpower of the British Empire and America had been preserved intact. The “American Army gathering in Britain and the Allies’ shattering air superiority show what the Germans will have to expect in the future.”

On the western and southern fronts the Germans had 10,000 planes, he said, with an even greater number lost on the eastern front, together with at least 50,000 trained airmen. Consequently the Gormans had been forced to reduce air training and “thus the Luftwaffe is going through a crisis that is the first sign of approaching defeat.”

He asserted that the German Navy, “though it avoids battles carefully,” had lopt two battleships, fire cruisers, nineteen destroyers nnd more than eighty auxiliary vessels, and its losses in submarines were far higher and “immeasurably .painful.” General Sikorski said a great part of the strength 'both of the German and’ Russian Armies was not then engaged in fighting, but was awaiting further developments of events, in which the African front would play a big part.