Toward the Mobile Fortress

Enormous possibilities lay open to the Allies this week: Allied invasion of Europe in the south and west, a final Russian offensive in the east, a culminating blow by air at Germany itself. If all of these possibilities became realities, if they proceeded to success, it was possible to conceive of the defeat of Hitler in 1943.

Men of the United Nations did not again make their old and bitter mistake and forget the great difference between possibility and achievement. The Allies were still geared for at least two more years of war in Europe. But they did speak with a new confidence.

General Henri Giraud, addressing French civilians in France, said: "Tomorrow the European fortress will be attacked." General Dwight D. Eisenhower, addressing French soldiers in Africa, promised that they would "march down the

Champs-Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe." King George VI of England suggested that the day of defeat was past and gone. "The debt of Dunkirk is repaid," he said. Joseph Stalin, congratulating Roosevelt and Churchill, said: "I wish you further successes," and Pravda, in Moscow, talked as if those successes would be accomplished very soon: "The time is approaching when jointly with the armies of our allies we shall break the backbone of the Fascist beast."

There was a new unity, both of hope and of action, among the Allies. There was certainty now that the Fortress Europe would be assaulted at many points--as OWI's Elmer Davis said, "this summer"; as General Giraud said, "from the north as well as from the south, from the east as well as from the west."

No one thought the job would be easy. The Fortress was, as the Russians could see in the stubborn Kuban, as the Allies had found in slow Tunisia, a tricky thing.

This fortress was more than a series of coastal guns. It was not just a wall, a thing to be pierced. It was a mobile fortress. Its walls could move from hill to hill. It consisted of great pools of armor and flesh, standing well inland from the coasts, ready to fling themselves at enemy beachheads, and of planes and submarines, striking on the approaches to the coasts.

But the German forts in Africa, which had traveled thousands of miles through sand and mud, over flats and up steeps, had now been cracked. So, in time, would the mobile and the fixed forts of Europe. That was the certainty which settled in the minds of men last week.

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