THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ATTRITION
By STRATEGICUS
THE battle of Germany has been raging, as I write, for not quite a fortnight. It has never had quite the symmetry of manoeuvres ; though they, beginning with a marked reverence for the clock, fre- quently tend to run amuck in the middle stage. The very name which Eisenhower chose to describe it marks it off as a decisive challenge for the greatest conceivable gage. Though the troops are inevitably concerned with definite and mainly small and concrete objectives, the real objective is greater and more vital than any of these ; but success in the local clash contributes to the purpose of the Command. It was only the Ninth and First American armies that struck on November 16 ; the other armies have joined in at different times as the occasion suggested. In this great offensive these armies represent something comparable to a massed orchestra in which all instruments contribute to the general end, though they intervene and operate under the baton of the conductor.
In the north it is the Maas and Roer and the streams that cut across the foreground that appear to monopolise the attention. Small tactical features are the stakes in fierce battles. In some places they have been the subject of wrangles for days on end. Frequently they pass from hand to hand several times before the Allies hold them so securely that a further step can be taken. At the other end of this long front it is miles, not yards, that measure the pace of the advance. Neither in fact tells us much of what is really at stake, neither conveys its own measure of progress. To grasp this we must first and last hold fast to the conviction that neither these comparatively small rivers, nor the Rhine, nor even Strasbourg is the main objective of the battle ; and the small gain in the north may, in the final analysis, be of a cardinal importance that the greater movements in the south do not necessarily possess.
The Allied Command design to defeat the German Army. In the east no great number of German divisions is being held down by actual operations. They are held to their positions mainly by threat. But here, on the western front, the Germans recognise as well as do we that they must fight for their lives. The fighting engages a greater part of the front than at the outset of the grand assault ; but it is clear beyond need of emphasis that every mile of it must be defended. It is not only the Ruhr that is at stake, not only the Ruhr and the Saar. Even if we take the whole of the Siegfried Belt this does not comprise all of the Germany that must be defended. But it is already some little time since a German commentator stated that Germany had not the numbers to engage in mobile warfare, that the position must be stabilised on the various frontiers if Germany is to have a chance to survive the attack.
It is, in fine, the question of numbers that mainly concerns the German High Command. Himmler is striving might and main to make two men grow where only one grew before ; but the present battle is being fought out on dispositions which we know, within certain definite limits. This is the- reason why the matter of numbers intrudes so much into the commentaries. Given the available num- bers, Runentedt had to distribute them as best he could to meet the Allied concentration ; and we can see the reflection of this decision in the actual numbers thrown in on the northern sector where Dempsey, Simpson and Hodges are making the pace. On a front of some twenty-five miles here it has been estimated that the enemy has thrown into the battle about twelve divisions. If his troops were evenly distributed over the whole front he, at this rate, would need to have almost 20o divisions. He has at most the equivalent of perhaps a fifth or a fourth of that number ; and the consequence is that this sector in the north must have about four times its strength pro rata.
This is admittedly a British estimate. If we take a German esti- mate of the Allied density we get over three times the German strength per mile. They say that Hodges has about one division per t,000 yards ; their strength would work out at less than half a division a mile. Generally speaking, we can agree that a greater number of men are required for the attack ; but it seems scarcely likely that the Americans are actually using the density attributed to them. But there is some evidence that the German concentration in the north is relatively very high, because the southern part of the front has given way. This is the inevitable effect of selective dispositions ; and yet it is quite obvious that the Germans would cease to be the professional soldiers they are if they attempted any other method of holding their front. But, in the result of the first phase of this battle, we see the inevitable consequences of a selec- tive disposition of troops under the test of a general engagement.
It was from the first the main hope of the grand assault that tension would merge into strain, strain would gather an increasing acceleration and eventually a break would come. Though the eastern front has not yet developed full activity, the strain on the western front has yielded its first fruits ; and in the south there is mobile warfare. There is no particular excellence in this warfare as such ; but we have been told that the Germans have not the numbers to sustain it. In itself, we might disregard tie contrast between the north and the south. But we should need to be very blind if we failed to note that this break in the south is the Q.E.D. of the proposition that the Germans are short of numbers and have been driven, accordingly, into making dispositions that could not meet the strain. The temporary stability in the north has been bought by the break-through to the Rhine near the Swiss frontier and the thrust through the Saverne Gap to Strasbourg.
About the Saverne thrust of General Patch's army we know less than we should like. The Germans appear to be delivering attacks on its flanks ; and they are trying to put a brake on the advance of de Tassigny's French troops in the south. It is probably under cover of these two reactions that Blascowitz is trying to withdraw his Nineteenth Army. The chances of his rescuing his troops do not seem very bright. The Allies are crossing the Vosges by more than one pass ; and it would be very unlike the First French Army, which so brilliantly broke through to the Rhine, to overlook the chance to cut off the Nineteenth Army ; they can count on the assistance of Patch's Seventh Army, which made so fine a pace from the Mediterranean. The latter has fanned out north and south, and the Army Group Commander, Devers, is no doubt trying to achieve something of a local envelopment here. There have been reports that the American aircraft have destroyed some of the bridges in the stretch of the Rhine which the Nineteenth Army must cross ; and, given half a chance by the weather, a Rhine crossing should be precarious and costly, if not impossible.
This, however, is not the whole matter. The original front in the south was probably no more than half as long as that which the Germans will be called on to defend very shortly. The Siegfried Belt leaves the Rhine south of Karlsruhe and makes there some- thing like a right angle. That is the new front which the Germans will be faced with defending when the position in the south is cleared up. At the very least, the Nineteenth Army will be weakened by the converging attack from the north and south. It may lose heavily in attempting to regain the safer east bank of the Rhine. In the end, it must be a much weaker army that will shoulder double the task it has already proved unable to sustain.
A phase is being completed, and its significance should not be lost. The assumption of a shortage of reserves upon which the Allied Command relied has been proved accurate by the unchallengeable evidence of the southern break. But it can be noted that the account is not yet closed. The shortage is now relatively greater, the line longer. The Saar is being uncovered. The Germans will be compelled to pivot somewhere about Merzig, and Patton is already pushing through these defences that Gamelin bit into in 1939. He has crossed the Saar river and holds apparently a foothold on the northern side. He has passed through St. Avoid on the road to Saarbriicken. The Saar is only less important to the Germans than the Ruhr. Here there will develop another great and bitter battle, and, from the earlier clashes with the German defences in this area we can be in no ignorance about the strength of the defences. It was in the forest near Forbach that the French first encountered the evil genius of the present war—the mine.
In this first phase of the great attack the Allies have discovered that the Germans are fighting with a ferocity that has rarely been equalled and with a skill that contrasts sharply with the bungling of the battle of Normandy. There they had at first all the pawns in their hands, and played so badly that they suffered the greatest defeat of their history. Now they are conscious that they fight for their lives ; for we have as yet no evidence that they recognise any division between them and the Nazis. They are fighting on their own soil. Should not we fight stubbornly and hard under those conditions? But this at least we have learned from the first phase of the battle: the particular part of the jigsaw conveys hardly anything of the complete picture. It is only the general view that interprets the local clash ; and, when we study the full picture, we see that the battle goes well, if perhaps more slowly and less in accordance with the pattern many of us had imagined beforehand.
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