THE WAR IN REVIEW
THE WAR IN REVIEW TO HIS GENERALS, assembled somewhere behind the German lines last week, Adolf Hitler is said to have issued a dramatic order that the Dnieper River line must be held at all...
...In his inaugural address, the new president pledged to recover his country's lost territories and to set an example of "democratic rule" in China...
...It was generally assumed that as the result of heavy rains and the need for regrouping and refitting, the Russians would pull up on the east bank of the river and create a temporary stalemate...
...At Stalingrad, he had witnessed his bid for the oil of Baku crushed in a disastrous defeat...
...Joseph Stilwell, commander of American forces in the China-Burma-India theater, and Lt...
...Heinrich Himmler, head butcher of the Gestapo, declared, for example, that "defeatism is nonexistent among the German people" and then added that it is being "eradicated without mercy...
...The coal reserves of the Donets Basin, the fertile agricultural lands of the eastern Ukraine, and the mineral deposits of the central Ukraine were back in Russian control...
...In China, meanwhile, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was inaugurated as the president of China...
...Well might the German leader be concerned about "set-backs" and morale...
...The American Fifth Army under Lt...
...Douglas Mac-Arthur's view of by-passing some of the enemy-held islands in the Southwest in favor of striking "massive strokes" against only main strategic objectives...
...One of the conferences brought together Admiral Ernest J. King, Commander in Chief of the United States Fleet, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, and Admiral William Halsey, Commander of the South Pacific Fleet...
...From November of 1942 to April of 1943 he had watched a resurgent Red Army hammer his proud legions back to the 1942 line, retaking 168,000 square miles of conquered territory...
...The Party has never allowed itself to be discouraged by setbacks...
...Another conference in the Pacific, called for the purpose of preparing a campaign against Japanese-held Burma, was held at New Delhi with Lord Louis Mountbatten, newly appointed commander of Allied forces in Southeast Asia, Lt...
...Naval task force raids on Wake Island shortly after this meeting was held stirred speculation that strategy in the Pacific might be undergoing a drastic change with emphasis on Gen...
...Lost to him in that great retreat were more than 90,000 square miles of some of the richest lands in the world...
...THE WAR IN REVIEW TO HIS GENERALS, assembled somewhere behind the German lines last week, Adolf Hitler is said to have issued a dramatic order that the Dnieper River line must be held at all costs...
...How serious Hitler himself regarded the situation was strikingly illustrated when he summoned his Nazi Party leaders to a meeting at his headquarters and asserted that the German people must not be permitted to lose morale, for if they did, the war would be lost...
...Nazi bigwigs, striving frantically to bolster the sagging home morale, were arranging giant pep rallies at which party luminaries vied with one another in producing optimistic and often quite contradictory oratory...
...The Russians, it appeared this week, had other irons in the hot political fires of Europe...
...Mark Clark had crossed the Volturno River and was advancing along the road to Rome against furious German resistance...
...In one year he had seen his armies thrown out of Africa after they had thundered to within striking distance of Alexandria...
...Charles de Gaulle, French leader, declared that the Mediterranean is a pathway for "a natural alliance with dear, powerful Russia...
...The suddenness with which the Reds sprang to the attack along the Dnieper surprised the world...
...This week it was becoming apparent either that the story of the Fuehrer's frantic visit to the front was the product of some correspondent's imagination or that the orders were given without reference to the striking power of the Red Army...
...Brehon Somervell, chief of the United States Army Service Forces...
...They knew that these were the trump cards that Russia's Foreign Commissar Molotov could play at the conference table, and they were disturbed by the increasing frequency of rumors that Moscow had an even bigger ace-in-the-hole—a separate peace with Germany—which might be played once the invaders had been driven from Russian soil...
...His last foothold in the Caucasus and his hope for the oil of that region were gone...
...Weapons alone will not tilt the scales unless human will backs them," said the man who once bragged of the invincibility of German arms...
...Its power of action, hard resoluteness, and extreme readiness to help provide the German people again today with moral backing and support, particularly in the difficult hours of air attacks...
...It was evident that Moscow's cultivation of the French Committee of National Liberation was bearing fruit...
...The spotlight fell this week on two conferences that may have far reaching effects on activities in that area...
...Meanwhile, the Anglo-American wedge into the European fortress was being driven steadily deeper...
...These and the continued westward drive of the Red Army were the developments which alarmed Hitler this week...
...Hitler Warns Germany The increase in the gravity of the Nazi position resulting from this latest development, the continued bad news from Italy where the Allies were still pushing ahead, and the sudden renewal of large scale bombing raids over the Reich itself, was nowhere more keenly felt than in Berlin itself...
...The war in the Pacific this week looked as though it might be heading toward a new and vital phase...
...These were the events, too, which gave food for thought to Britain's Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and Secretary of State Cordell Hull as they prepared to leave for Moscow and the tri-partite conference aimed at settling some of the differences in the United Nations family...
...If the German people preserve this morale," he continued, "which they have shown on the battlefields and at home, the war can never be lost but must and will bring a great German victory...
...On the Adriatic coast the British Eighth Army, using amphibious tactics to execute landings behind enemy defenses, continued to advance at about the same pace as the Americans...
...His position in the Crimea which gave him control of the iron deposits there and domination of the Black Sea were in imminent peril...
...On July 12 of this year he had seen the mighty Russians wrest the initiative from his attacking armies and begin the great counter-offensive that was to throw him into one of the greatest retreats in history...
...New Phase In Far East...
...For the Russians, pushing across the river, had opened and were expanding several bridgeheads, and at mid-week were laying siege to the great Ukrainian capital of Kiev...
Vol. 7 • October 1943 • No. 42
