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The question of how hard or how early the West Wall is to break depends on manpower. Last week's victories at Mons and Liège helped to cut off several divisions which the Germans had undoubtedly counted on.
The Germans may have had about 20 divisions available last week in the West Wall and its approaches, perhaps ten more that can get back from the Low Countries. Perhaps six or eight more succeeded in retiring from southern France to the Belfort Gap; and perhaps ten divisions were available from Himmler's reserve army.
This guesstimate would give the Germans 48 divisions — but most of them under strength and some of them disorganized.
With such forces the Nazis must hold a line almost eight times as long as Rom mel's original front in Normandy (where at the height of battle they had 30 divisions).
The question of whether the Germans can put up an effective defense depends on how much time they have. Given enough time, they may be able to bring several divisions from Finland and Norway, and even from the Balkans. With time they can assemble more second-grade cannon fodder to stuff their pillboxes. Last week the process was already under way.
At Hasselt, an important road junction in Belgium, where units of the U.S. First joined forces with the British Second Army, the British reported that they had found: 1) troops hurriedly brought down from Denmark; 2) fanatic youths, 17 and 18 years old, who had been training as Luftwaffe pilots in Holland until a fortnight ago.
In France the remnants of crack SS divisions were given priority over all the others in the flight to the West Wall.
Germany was arming service troops and medical corpsmen, sending them into combat (Joseph Goebbels had reportedly done away with the German Red Cross).
Nazi Chief of Staff Heinz Guderian pleaded for volunteers from the Hitler-jugend (boys 14 to 17 years). The propaganda radio bleated: "Thousands of fanatic Hitler youths are moving up to the front." For Producer Eisenhower the problem was to get his cast and props on the spot at once. The Germans clinging to the ports of France were spending their lives to delay him. Eisenhower's drives were already in operation at a fantastic distance of 400 to 550 miles from Cherbourg and the nearby beaches, the fount of his supplies. If he were to attack quickly he would have to have miracles from his service of supply.
Late Men. When Field Marshal Heinz Guderian took charge of the Wehrmaoht (TIME, Aug. 7), he had to draft reserves available for the west to bolster the German east front. Last week Guderian had to draft a field marshal from the east, where he had stopped the Russians before Warsaw, to try to stem the Allied tides in the west. The new oberbefehlshaber was stocky, monocled, 53-year-old Walter von Model (rhymes with yodel), popular in Germany, a Hitler-Himmler favorite as well. Model threw his energies into putting up a stiff delaying action on the Moselle River, to gain time. General Patton's Third Army crossed the Moselle last week but suffered heavy losses doing it, cleared a long section of the Maginot forts, found many of its eastward-pointed guns still operable.