The Free Lance-Star (June 14, 1944)
Editorial: Roads to Berlin
There are many roads to Berlin, and tough, gaunt, battle-hardened men, grim and resourceful, will be plodding along most of these roads before many weeks have passed.
One road runs east from Normandy to Paris and thence northeast through scarred territory in which Americans have fought before, including the Argonne Forest. It is this highway to the Reich that has commanded world interest since the Allied landings in France.
And of course, there is the road up from Italy, rough – especially in its passage through the Alps – and long. There are other possible avenues of approach to Berlin, including that from the east, where the Russians, after a brief rest, have massed for the renewal of their mighty drive to free their own soil and break through to Germany.
For the moment, while Gen. Eisenhower’s forces are establishing themselves on the continent, this new phase of the war commands absorbing interest everywhere. The attack across the Channel is a military epic. It is an enterprise that Napoleon feared to undertake. Hitler, with all his audacity and his great yearning to conquer England, quailed at the prospect.
But eventually the war in Europe will settle into the pattern drawn at Tehran, a pattern which called for envelopment of the Reich through steady progress from a number of directions toward the one objective – Berlin – or unconditional surrender by Nazis somewhere along the way to avert the destruction of their homeland.
American and British thoughts and hopes will center in Western Europe, but the large operations may develop in the east by Red armies which are now at a high peak of power even after three years of bitter fighting and heartbreaking losses.
The source which holds the greatest danger and which demands the heaviest safeguards is as mystifying to the German High Command as was the place and time of the invasion. Hitler’s problems of defense multiply and grow more complex as crushing defeat draws closer.