South Yorkshire Times, July 15th, 1944
Germany at Bay
Caen, the Norman town in the streets of which British airborne troops were fighting on the night of D-Day, has at last been seized from the enemy. For the last month it has proved a bolt preventing the Eastern extension of the allied bridgehead, and though the time during which our forces have been contained in the Caen sector has been put to good account the difficulties experienced in taking the town (still in part fiercely disputed by the enemy) provides a revealing glimpse of the Nazi state of mind. Resistance is as determined as ever. General Montgomery has referred to “a skilful enemy whose good fighting qualities and tenacity in battle cannot be attract our admiration.” With the Americans thrusting forward at the Western end of the front and the British and Canadians seeking to exploit the Caen success, progress is still far from attaining the dimensions of a break through on the Russian pattern. The Germans know the strength as well as the weakness of their hand and present indications are that they mean to play it out.
This week General Eisenhower has thought fit to deliver a warning against easy optimism and has spoken of the need to be prepared for long and bitter fighting. That is the only sane way in which to view the big three-front campaign on which the United Nations are now embarked. If Germany cracks and cries for quarter, so much the better, but Hitler and the Nazis remain securely in authority. The theme to which they constantly return is that Germany has burnt her boats, that it must be a fight to the finish, and it even appears that they are prepared to see Germany utterly destroyed in the process rather than that the Nazi creed should sacrifice itself or acknowledge its inevitable overthrow.
A glance at the map of France and the Low Countries lends added point to General Eisenhower’s words. It explains also why the Germans are still exerting themselves feverishly to keep our invading armies hemmed into their comparatively narrow holding. They mean to make us fight for our footing and to sell every mile of the buffer territories they hold as dearly as they can. Sooner or later, they must give way. The Allies outmatch them at all points. Time alone qualifies the weight of the Allied blow. And once the British and American masses are deployed the Germans’ fighting withdrawal will be greatly accelerated. Then the phase of the retreat on the Eastern front plan will be ushered in, with manoeuvre and counter manoeuvre and the Reichswehr yielding each topographical defence position with bitter reluctance and professional evasiveness. The great difference between retreat in the West and retreat in the East is the menace of the sea flank, the threat of a further landing which may precipitate the ultimate and inevitable disaster.
However hollow Germany’s conquests of the early years of the war, they have given her a respite which her military genius is straining to exploit to the maximum, buoyed by the specious hope that time will spare the Third Reich the last mortal thrust.