Dwindling Space

Since defeat had become inevitable, the German plan of resistance had been based heavily on space--territory outside the Fatherland to be yielded slowly, skillfully, expensively to the enemy. Now the space was disappearing like dry grass in a prairie fire. The end could not be far off.

On the east, Germany's "safety belt" between the White Russian river barriers and the Vistula, extending to a depth of 300 to 350 miles, had been overrun in six weeks. The German attempt to yield it slowly had been a colossal failure. The Nazi defense had been neither skillful nor economical: the prisoners taken by Russia could be totaled in six figures. The Russians battered on toward German soil.

That was only one of the sectors where Adolf Hitler had hoped to use his military intuition to gain time for Germany, to make the Allies wear themselves out, to set the stage for a negotiated peace, perhaps meantime to develop some kind of a devastating new weapon that might still win the war.

There was another sector on the west, where the Allied beachhead in Normandy hung in stalemate and German skill seemed to be accomplishing something. Then came the breakthrough: Brittany was lost, a steel-tipped javelin poised to hurl at Paris, heart of Germany's western defenses. Nor could Hitler find any comfort in the south. There nothing was left except a weary German army, fighting in Northern Italy--where it might yet be trapped.

From the Air. Allied tactical aircraft was all but unopposed. The strategic bombers never stopped; daily, by the thousands, they brought destruction deep in Fortress Europe to the factories where the Nazis tried to turn out oil, aircraft, new weapons.

While Allied leaders cried to their people that the war had not yet been won, that production must go on, no man could miss the signs of impending crackup. All in all, it was a fitting week for Winston Churchill to pay his sardonic respects to Adolf Hitler:

"It may well be that the Russian successes have been somewhat aided by the strategy of Corporal Hitler. Even military idiots find it difficult not to see some faults in some of his actions. ... On the whole I think it is better for officers to rise in the proper way."

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