What to Do?

Through the week Adolf Hitler was deeply engaged in urgent discussions with Germany's top military commanders. The question: What to do?

Dispatches from a neutral source of the German frontier pointed out an apt historical parallel: Kaiser Wilhelm II's celebrated meeting with his Crown Council in August 1918, when the German war lords of that day decided that bitter, drawn-out fighting might yet weary the Allies into granting a soft peace.

Something of the sort may have been in the minds of Hitler's men; they had ample reason. The nation whose military gospel had been to fight on one front at a time was now getting the worst of it on three land fronts--and a punishing fourth front, the air. German war production was sagging; the Allied blockade was clamping tighter.

What to do? One obvious move was to sack a general (see Battle of France). There was even a rumor that Hitler himself might assume command in the west, a move not calculated to reassure German soldiers lucky enough to have survived the Fuhrer's earlier experiments with the intuitive method of military command.

What to do? The party might fall back on its political genius, hope to win the peace even if the war were lost (see FOREIGN NEWS). But that would be easier to plan than to perform. The Allied forces were strong enough to smash "slow delaying actions." And how long, and how well, could German troops fight, once they knew they were no longer fighting to win?

What to do?

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