BREAKING RULES IN FRANCE
Villard, Oswald Garrison
Breaking Rules In France THE extraordinary progress being made in France after the stalemate in Normandy will go down in history as one of the most remarkable of military achievements. One has only...
...So in France we are rushing ahead apparently without the slightest consideration for all the usual formulae of invasion...
...Those Robot Bombs The Germans in their drive into Poland and their wild rush of May, 1940, into France, also used the spearhead attack and defied the usual conventions...
...But whether the retirement is in accordance with the German strategic plan to go back to the Rhine, as they have fallen back on the East Prussian border, or whether it is involuntary, the American and British achievements are nonetheless extraordinary...
...Magnificent Justification More than that, these advancing columns seem to be able to cut loose from their supply bases, or else they are being provisioned and supplied with the same reckless daring and with a versatility staggering to anyone familiar with the progress of our armies in 1917-18...
...To such a pass have come the invincible German forces of 1940...
...Fronts are fluid and subject to extraordinary changes...
...One has only to contrast it with the dreadful stalemates of 1914-18, when men faced each other in the trenches for four years and considered it a great victory if they gained 2,000 yards at a frightful expenditure in human lives, to realize that we have not only returned to a war of motion and maneuver, but to an extraordinary development of war strategy...
...By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD Perhaps when this war is over the German development of the robot bomb will prove to be the outstanding military development of this war, since Air Chief Marshal, Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, commander-in-chief of the Allied Expeditionary Airforce, has declared that "the robot may make the airplane more of a defensive weapon and change military science radically...
...Flying wedges are driven in to the enemy's lines without thought of keeping in touch with other flying columns, or maintaining a united even front...
...It looks, of course, as if the German demoralization is much greater than had been thought possible...
...Details of how this has been done have not yet reached us and may not be known for a long while, but some day they will be among the most fascinating reading of all the great mass of literature which this war will produce—already promising to be so vast as to make libraries wholly devoted to the subject necessary, and of great size...
...Railroads seem to play less and less a role, motor transport tells the whole story, as it must have done in Russia...
...They must be paralyzing the German Government, which suddenly finds itself not only unable to hold the boasted wall of Europe but actually compelled, as on the Eastern front, to do everything possible to save its armies from complete disaster...
...It is true that the old principles still remain : It is still a question of trying to outflank the enemy and so to compel his retirement and to avoid frontal attacks as far as possible...
...If that is the case we can assert we have improved upon their tactics, as we have improved upon their dive-bombers, though not upon their tanks, for their Panthers and Tigers seem to be better than anything we have yet turned out, despite Winston Churchill's praise of the Allied tanks...
...Still their claim to strategical originality may be justified...
...It is not only a magnificent justification for those who favored the invasion, it is the most astounding proof of the thoroughness with which the whole invading forces were prepared for the undertaking, and of the ability to get supplies ashore when we had only one great port at our disposal, and that by no means restored to service...
...They, too, have demonstrated that the modern motorized and tractor-using army can go across country once a break-through has occurred and the enemy begins to retreat...
...Eisenhower's forces have even been able to defy weeks of the worst weather known in many years...
...This type of warfare we are witnessing is a new development of the 1940 German tactics in that the striving is for a break-through after which columns go racing in every direction, throwing conservative strategical considerations to the wind...
...But the opposition against them was so far inferior to what the United Nations have been encountering in France that the problems were quite different...
...There the advance of the Russian armies in the Winter months and through the Spring thaws, without interruption, through a country devastated and ravaged, with the railroads torn up and so far as possible destroyed, is one of the wonders of all time...
...We must be landing enormous supplies besides the great armies which for the first time in American history are being operated as "an Army group," by putting them ashore on open beaches and by the use of all the extraordinary new amphibian landing craft...
Vol. 8 • September 1944 • No. 36
