Thorny Package

The richest German industrial prize in the west--the Ruhr Valley--last week turned out to be a thorny package.

When units of the U.S. First and Ninth Armies joined hands at Lippstadt (TIME, April 9), the Germans in the Ruhr were cut off in a pocket about 200 miles around, anchored on the Rhine from Bonn to Duisburg. Trapped inside were elements of the German Fifteenth, First Parachute and Fifth Panzer Armies--120,000 to 125,000 troops.

These men could be depended on to fight hard--and they did. Even the Volkssturm fighting alongside them performed well. The pocket was believed to be plentifully supplied with ammunition, gasoline and food. It was thickly studded with towns and cities--easy to defend, hard to take.

An Allied patrol crossed the Ruhr River to parley with the German major commanding Duisburg, and called on him to surrender. He said nein. Nowhere else around the perimeter was there any visible inclination to give up.

The Ruhr industries were lost to Germany; but the war was much too far along for the Allies to sit back and wait for the loss to take effect. So long as Germans held the Ruhr, they 1) blocked several east-west trunk rail lines and highways, thus complicating the Allied supply problem; 2) kept the Allies away from the Ruhr's coal; 3) held a base for possible guerrilla war in the Allied rear; and 4) tied down at least five infantry and one armored division, identified in dispatches, and probably several others as well.

The Ninth Army's 83rd Division fought into Hamm, which has the biggest rail marshalling yards in Germany, and three days later cleared the city. Elsewhere even the fighting for villages was tough. The Germans launched small but savage counterattacks with tanks, fought off the U.S. attacks with dug-in tanks and self-propelled guns. In the Siegen area, on the south side of the pocket, they put in ten counterattacks in one day.

At week's end, the pocket was not much smaller than when the week began. The Allied commanders evidently decided that the Ruhr must be reduced at all costs--even the cost of delaying the push deeper into the heart of Germany. The Ninth Army redoubled its efforts, smashed into Dortmund, Gelsenkirchen and Essen.

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