Wairarapa Times-Age WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 1943. GERMANY’S ELASTIC STRATEGY.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 September 1943, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 1943. GERMANY’S ELASTIC STRATEGY.

.— ♦ WITH its fables on the subject of an “elastic strategy,” allegedly taken over from the Russians, the German propaganda machine may succeed in deceiving for a time a section o its home public, but all who are free to look at the tacts wil perceive clearly that in the loss of Taganrog, on the bea ot Azov the Nazis have suffered another major del eat. It is a «eleat which follows logically on other disasters which have befallen them on the Eastern front during the last few weeks in the loss of the great bastion of Orel, together with Kharkov and an extending list of bases and communication centres. Very recently the Germans were committed, not to. a defensive effort on the Eastern front, but to a final bid for victory. Less than two months ago Hitler told his troops that their o - Tensive against the Kursk salient would be “the battle which will decide the outcome of this war.” It is now known to all the world, and to none better than the survivors of the troops to whom that boast was made, that the German. attempt to sinas i the Kursk salient, though it was maintained for nearly a fortnight at a terrible cost in lives and material, was a total and unrelieved failure. This, however, was only a beginning. The Soviet armies which Hitler had proposed once again to destroy not only hurled back in ruinous defeat the enemy attack on the Kursk defences, but with that attack still in progress launched a series of blows which have smashed and wrecked the German front in Southern Russia. The capture of Orel was in itself a far greater and more telling stroke of war than the Germans had. attempted in then Kursk offensive. Orel was the all-important pivot between the enemy central and southern fronts. In addition it had been developed, in two years of occupation, into an offensive base fioni which the Germans, could they have grasped the initiative, might have made a formidable offensive thrust, turning north to outflank the defences of Moscow, or south in another bid for the Caucasian territory and its oil. The capture of Orel cleared the way for the great drives in which the Russians have taken Kharkov and penetrated to within sixty miles of the Dnieper on the north, and in the south have now taken Taganrog and pressed far beyond it to the.west, after breaching the enemy defences on a front of forty miles.. An immediate result is to create a position of deadly insecurity for the Germans in the positions they still hold in the important and valuable Donetz basin, but there are ever more promising indications, also, that the German retreat to the line of the River Dnieper is likely to be harried and difficult and the enemy has no assurance that even when that long retreat has been completed his position will be any more secure or more promising than it is now. As the last weeks of good weather pass, it is a fact to be remembered that the superiority of the Russians in winter warfare is admitted, perforce, even by their enemies.

It may well be understood that in these circumstances Hitler is reduced to silence and his propaganda department to vain talk about the advantages of an elastic defence. The situation on the Eastern front of course has to be considered in its setting’ of the war as a whole. While the German armies are menaced as never before in Russia, the Allied air forces are striking with telling effect at Germany, Italy and enemy-occu-pied territory and new developments of invasion in south and west are in imminent prospect. At any moment the problems by which Germany is faced in Russia, may be multiplied. The Danes are in open revolt. Even Sweden, placed though she is almost in Germany’s grasp, is bordering on an attitude of bold defiance, and at the other end of Europe there are prospects of a collapse in Bulgaria, which might do a good deal to open a way of invasion through the Balkans.