Last week General Eisenhower reached a pregnant point in his career. He was still very, very busy collecting royalties from his last smash hit in Normandy; and doubly busy—putting on a new production that would make or break his season.
Royalties. Eisenhower's collection of royalties last week showed that the Allies were still fighting a smart war. The biggest single collection took place at Mons. There, by the shrewd tactic of conducting a pursuit not from behind the enemy—who could delay it by dropping off rear guards—but beside the enemy on parallel roads, General Hodges' First American Army succeeded in destroying the biggest part of the Nazi rear guard.
Another smart move of General Hodges —pushing two columns forward to threaten Liège and then cutting the city off from behind by a third column—cut up another German division, captured a thousand prisoners, killed one general and captured another without a real fight.
Other royalties were collected by Lieut. General Patch's northbound Seventh Army, which pushed the Germans hard on the retreat which they had no choice of making because of Eisenhower's success in northern France.
"Sandy" Patch exacted terrible losses from the enemy, in his four-week pursuit up the Rhone and Doubs to the Belfort Gap, where he made junction with the U.S. Third Army. The Germans lost an estimated 60,000 in western France who never had a chance to fight.
Eisenhower also began to collect royalties in the air. His ground victories, long aided by air supremacy, now freed the airforce from its long task of dumping heavy loads on occupied territory, including the robomb coast. Bombers and fighters in the west now concentrated on Germany itself. Day & night, railroad centers behind the West Wall and industries in central Germany took 1,000-plane doses of bad medicine—all the bad medicine which western Europe had previously had to share. Over Leipzig, while 1,000 bombers bashed oil plants, 800 U.S. fighters got a record battle's bag of 175 German planes. In two days of good hunting fighters destroyed 262 planes aground, 34 aloft.
Rape of the Rhine Maidens. Every royalty that Eisenhower collected on his last show improved the prospects for his next production—a heroic opera about the breaking of the Siegfried Line and the rape of the Rhine Maidens. The curtain was lifting—Courtney Hodges'troops were on German soil.
The West Wall is formidable enough in dragon-toothed antitank traps, in a multiplicity of small cross-firing forts, in a checkered labyrinth of woods and blockhouses, in roads dead-ended at gun range. But it is not designed to stop an enemy in his tracks. It is designed to exhaust an enemy who breaks into it, so that fresh reserves, using the classic Prussian defense by counterattack, can rush in and hurl him back.
For this sort of defense, any Hitler youth, any old garrison service corpsman, any dummkopf may be able to stand in a concrete pillbox and press a trigger, till he is killed. But to make the West Wall effective, 30 to 45 divisions are needed, and a good proportion of them must be first-rate troops for counterattacking.