South Yorkshire Times, September 2nd 1944
How Long?
Allied armies are now deploying on the battlefields of the last war. Names rendered familiar by the swaying battles of the old Western Front are daily becoming more common in the communiques, and Paris, so dramatically liberated last week, is now left in the wake of the great advances. Whereas a few weeks ago it was tacitly accepted that the invasion operations had fallen a little behind schedule, it now seems equally certain that the British, American and Dominion armies, with their allied formations and the powerful support of the Maquis, have made the original schedule quite out of date. The race for the Rhine is on and the Germans are not so far making a particularly good show in this life and death challenge.
British and Canadian troops are already on the move in a determined attempt to smoke out the nests whence most of the flying-bombs have been launched. Out-flanked to the south East, the Nazis have small hope of holding this strip of coast for long. And even if they dispute its possession in the most desperate fashion, these devilish sites must very soon be starved of supplies owing to the cutting of their lines of communication. The menace from the Pas de Calais carries now a limited threat, but even when this vantage point has been snatched from them the Germans will be able to carry on their harassing fire for a period from sites in the Low Countries which we know to be already in use. However, with the front along which these missiles can be launched cut by at least fifty per cent, the task of our defences should be much easier and London’s ordeal the less fearful.
But what of the fabulous V-2? This and one or two others secret weapons with which the Nazis continue to try to make our blood curdle, represent just about the last cards in Hitler’s hand. The time for him to play them is drawing near. If they amount to anything more than terrorist propaganda, we ought soon to know one way or the other. The course of the war during the last few weeks has given more cause for solid optimism on the side of the Allies than any other series of events in the five long years since hostilities started. Germany has suffered a crushing defeat in the West which is being brilliantly exploited by General Montgomery and his American colleagues in the field. This defeat has been so decisive that it seems highly probable that the German Army cannot pull itself together for a serious stand anywhere short of the frontiers of the Reich. In Southern France the Nazi rout is just as complete; the defection of Romania has enabled the Red Army to surge forward in a dangerous thrust towards the South-Eastern frontiers of Germany; and the Russian threat on the Eastern boundary of Hitler’s fortress is immediate, poised for a bloody Autumn harvest. The situation is such that if our adversary had been the old Imperial Germany we could almost have set a limit to the struggle in terms of weeks. But we have to remember that Nazi Germany is a very different proposition. With its Gestapo, its S.S., its fanatical insistence on the intrinsic merits of a racial fight to the death, its depraved leaders already damned past redemption in the eyes of the civilized world and its appalling blood guilt, Hitler’s Reich is a nation which fights with little hope of quarter. Germany’s official war commentators can only harp on the necessity to fight on in the hope that the Allies may flinch at least from their avowed purpose of cleansing Europe of the last trace of Nazism. On the extent to which Germany accepts this counsel of despair depends the duration of the war.