Evening star., 1944-06-12
Hitler at Buy

the picture In Normandy seems
sharp and clear enough now to war
rant the strong faith that the great
port OF Cherbourg and the whole of
the peninsula are going to be won
by our Allied arms.
The young men who are fighting
and dying there-the young Britons.
the young Canadians, the young
Americans-have seen to that; for
by their raw courage and flame
pure sacrifice they have made 1t as
certain as anything can be at this
juncture that the invasion of France
will stick, no matter how hard or
desperately the Nazis may try to
batter 1t back into the sea.
This faith, this degree of GER
tainty, seems justified ON the
strength of what our Allied troops
have accomplished to date in Nor
mandy. They have landed; they
have dug in; they have smashed
the enemy's first counterthrusts;
they have advanced, and although
bitterer and more crucial tests still
lie in wait for them, we can have
confidence in our prayer that having
achieved so much already, they will
hold their ground and then move
forward again - just as their
brothers in arms have done in
Italy-until their victory is won.
And as If to demonstrate their
own faith in this respect, the top
most leaders of Americas land, sea
and air forces - General Marshall,
Admiral King and General Arnold,
our Joint Chiefs of Staff-have just
arrived in Britain to perfect battle
plans with their British counter
parts and with General Eisenhower,
the supreme commander. It is a
portentous meeting, one in which 1t
may be assumed that our immense
Allied power is being geared for the
kill and in which the enemy can
read nothing but his own eventual
doom.
Four years ago how different the
picture was! Then everything was
black for free men everywhere and
only Hitler and his followers could
be confident. Now the situation is
wholly reversed and more than re-
versed, for as badly of as liberty
was in 1910, the Nazi tyranny is far
worse off in 1914. Four years ago,
at any rate, though our side was in
retreat, and in some places in chains
and on it's knees, we yet had vast
spiritual and material resources in
reserve, so that today, as the final
European battles begin, we are
still relatively fresh, whereas our
enemy-a titan wounded and bleed
ing profusely in a dozen different
places-weakens progressively, as If
smitten with a hemophilia of sorts,
and he knows 1T is malady which
must sooner or later send him to
his grave.
The intimations of his own NOR
tality, and of the mortality of all of
must in fact seem to
Hitler to be more than intimations
now. For they are no longer quiet
things, like sudden occasional fiut-
terings in the mind and heart. They
are loud. They are convulsive. They
scream and thunder. Forgetting
stalingrad and Tunisia and the lost
battle of the Atlantic, let the
Fuehrer look anywhere today and
he can see and hear nothing but his
tory proclaiming, with the sound of
trumpets, that his days are num-
bered.
In the south, in Italy, catastrophe
has already engulfed his armies. In
the east, where he has gone through
long series of disasters, new disas-
ters are being prepared for him. In
the west, in France, the myth of the
impregnability of his Atlantic
Wall" has been irreparably shat
tered. And all the while, with our
gigantic Allied air fleets hammering
at him from every direction and
with millions of the oppressed sur
rounding him and waiting to tear
him down, he cannot know whether
or when or where still other assaults
will be made against his crumbling
fortress"
All Hitler can know is that our
forces in Normandy have made the
pattern of his encirclement dramati-
cally clear; the trap has been
sprung on him, and however terrible
or long his flnal struggle may be,
he is done In now, but for the killing.