South: Strategical Nightmare

Germany's western front was bent but never broken in World War I. Her surrender followed quickly after the collapse of her southern front--in the Balkans and Italy. Last week Germany's southern front was again a disjointed strategical nightmare where anything might happen--and where much was happening.

The news last week from the tactically disconnected sectors of this interconnected front, stretching a thousand crazy miles from west of Genoa to the mouths of the Danube:

In Western Italy, Italian partisans, officially recognized and directed by General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, organized under the name Italia Combatte (Italy Fights), had virtually cleared the Germans out of Liguria. They were reported actually running most of the railroads, credited with an amazing job of protecting power plants and similar installations from the Nazis.

North of the Arno, the U.S. Fifth and British Eighth Armies made inroads at both ends of the Gothic Line. Torrential rains and stubborn Nazi rear guards kept them from spectacular results, but Field Marshal Albert Kesselring was making his last stand, which would end when the British could break through Rimini into the plain of the Po. Already he had pulled back the tough Nazis of the ist Parachute Division who had taken a beating before Rimini, and replaced them with Turkoman infantry of the 162nd Division.

Kesselring might make a pause in the Dolomites and along the Isonzo River (bloody battleground in World War I), where Italy is hinged to Yugoslavia. But these lines would be untenable if the Nazis in Yugoslavia collapsed behind him.

In Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito's National Army of Liberation, with a leaven of British and U.S. specialists (notably in demolition, radio, and intelligence), slashed gaps in railroad lines along which the Germans might try to retreat. The little people of the hills, ground down by the Herrenvolk, were rising in arms. And already the Russian armies were knocking at the Iron Gate to join them.

The German garrison troops still in Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece and the Aegean might never be able to escape. They had held their own with the aid of 15 Bulgarian divisions. The hapless Bulgar troops did not yet know whether they should still fight--and, if so, on which side. Serbian Chetniks were found to be still aiding the Germans.

At the Iron Gate, where the Danube flows between 200-foot piles of sandstone, some of Tito's men battled to join Red armymen who had come from the Ukraine, through Bessarabia, through the Galati Gap, through the heart of Rumania at breakneck pace. To the east, General Feodor I. Tolbukhin's Third Ukraine Army was mopping up Nazi stragglers on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast. To the north, General Rodion Malinovsky was stabbing through the Transylvanian Alps to the great plain of Hungary.

The Germans' Hollywoodish Balkan empire was collapsing like a papier-mache set.

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