CRUCIAL BATTLES

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 232, 28 June 1944, Page 4

CRUCIAL BATTLES

Survey Of European Fronts GERMAN SHORTAGE OF TROOPS (By Telegraph.—Press Aesti.— Copyright) (Special Correnpondent.) LONDON, June 26. The news that the Russians have begun their summer offensive has been received with grim satisfaction. Germany is now fighting on three fronts, and her position is thus summed up by the “Manchester Guardian”: — “Leaving out Norway and Denmark, and starting from Holland, the Germans are now defending a series of fronts over 3500 miles long, in a great sweep down western and southern France to Italy, through Yugoslavia, on to Rumania, and then up again through Russia to the Baltic. “Germany’s forces are too thin to hold anything so extensive if they are generally attacked; they are too thin to hold the Russian sector alone if thrusts fall heavily from more than one direction. The days of robbing a quiet front to support a disturbed one are gone.. We have the enemy in a widespread grip, and nowhere will he have what he needs to hold us.”

Coming Big Retreat Stating that Germany is fighting het last battle, Lieutenant-General H. G. Martin, in the “Daily Telegraph,” expresses the opinion that the battle of armour between Tilly and Caen is one of the decisive battles of the war. “If the British and Canadian forces can but win that fight and can but break that mass of German armour,” he says, “they will have broken the real breakwater which is restraining the mounting wave of Allied invasion.”

He adds: “Caen is the pivot of FieldMarshal Runstedt’s line in France. He holds on in order that he may retain power to swing back his whole fine pivoted on Caen in a progressive retraction of the German front from the south-west toward the north-east. Ultimately, in its need to save men, the German High Command may well abandon all of France south and west of the Seine, as far as to Basle on the Swiss'frontier.”

Regarding Italy, Lieutenant-General Martin thinks Kesselring must hold the Rimini-Pisa line till such time as Runstedt’s withdrawal from southern. France, and adds that he is likely to withdraw to the north-east in a manner designed to deny approaches alike to Brenner and Austria and to Istria and the Balkans. Lieutenant-General Martin also suggests that the Russians’ offensive at Vitebsk is not the sum total of the Red Army’s effort, He says they will surely strike in the south against Lvov, Jassy, and Galatz, the gateways to the Balkans, and adds: “In the south the Germans must stand and fight till they break, and there the end is likely to come soonest.”

Runstedt’s Reserves. The “Economist.” commenting on the invasion, says: “The puzzle that emerges from all reports from Normandy is still the question of what reserves in men. and equipment the German command possesses. If it is true that Runstedt has already thrown .in more than half his armour against the Allies, with so poor results, then his outlook for defence must be bleak indeed. But it may be that the panzer divisions engaged in the Caen area form a much smaller proportion of his reserves than the reports suggest. “Even so, the fighting in Normandy has revealed a striking inadequacy in Rundstedt’s artillery, a weapon which was regarded as being largely eclipsed by the tank in the first two years of the war, and which has since regained its prominent role.” He adds that the Allied air force has remained undisputed master over the battlefields and communication lines, in spite of the unfavourable weather.