Evening Republican, Volume 59, Number 120, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 June 1917 — BRITISH UPSET GERMANY'S PLANS [ARTICLE]

BRITISH UPSET GERMANY'S PLANS

Remarkable Mobility of Britain’s Army Defeats Strategy of Hindenburg. TRACTORS THE BIG FACTOR German General Staff Failed to Calculate Quick Repair of Roads and Immediate Advance of Light and Heavy Artillery. By JUDSON C. WELLIVER, Correspondent of the New York Sun. London. —AU the world wondered — und nobody more than Marshal Hindenburg—that the British were able to keep instantly and constantly right on the heels of the retreating Germans after the recent evacuation of the territory back of the Bapaume-Peronne line. The thing didn’t fall out at all as the Gerinan general staff had foreseen. Those masters of the art of war had carefully calculated that when they yielded a very little ground after having first destroyed villages, blown up roads and furrowed the terrain with trenches and shellholes it would take at least a series of weeks for the British to bring up their forces and prepare -for—a- new-alla ek. —This was the whole strategy of the establishment of the new Hindenburg line. The weakness of Hindenburg’s calculation was that he knew too much about the established and accepted rules of war and too little about English and American ingenuity in producing the new types of war machine which make it possible for an army nowadays to, move faster than it ever could before.

Caterpillar tractors, as big as a respectable locomotive, make it possible to do things' with even the biggest howitzers that were undreamed of even when this war began. —Tractors the Big Factors. I have seen a couple of these leviathans taking a ten-inch howitzer over a road that had been theoretically “destroyed” three days earlier, almost under the fire of the enemy and actually within their own range of the nearest enemy positions, at the rate of seven or eight miles an hour. All the horses that ever were commandeered couldn’t have been harnessed to do that job, simply because they couldn’t have got themselves through the mud, to say nothing of pulling something after them. I studied for several days the methods by. which one army was fairly leaping on the trail of another, and it seemed to me the greatest wonder that the war had—developed, The steel works of Birmingham and Bethlehem and Pittsburgh were doing it. But even before their giant contraptions could perform, the road must be_ready for them. .This reconstruction of roads is just plain, back-breaking, awful drudgery; but what magnificently organized and predigested drudgery! One would imagine that there must have been tens of thousands of huge motortrucks just back of the British line, everyone of them loaded to the last ounce of capacity with rock in graduated sizes, with massive timbers, piles, steel bolts and nuts and spikes and hammers and .sledges and everything else requisite for the road building to the front. Nothing had been forgotten, and although the evacuated region was a horror of mud and utter desolation, the evidence of absolute

organization, of perfect arrangement, of preHse and yet thoroughly elastic and adaptable plans was to be seen everywhere.. The emergency engineers who manage these things are wonders''in their way. They seem to know by Instinct what will be required of them. But it isn’t instinctso much as it is the complete knowledge of the terrain that has been brought back to them in the photographs taken by the flying corps* observers. Everything is -on hand, everything is in its right place, every man understands, just what is expected of him, and when they move forward there is seldom a hitch. Inevitably, it is fearfully expensive business, and sometipies there is overpreparation for the sake of certainty. Light Guns Move Quickly. The lighter and more mobile guns of course go forward earliest. They are built especially for this kind of experience and can get over half-built roads with an agility and safety that could not possibly be believed if one hadn’t seen the performance. The French “755” are particularly useful in this style of quick advance, but the British light guns, as now built, are hardly inferior. The handling of the 6, 8. 10, 12 and even 15-lnch howitzers is, of course, must impressive. Hitched to the J-v-cater- - tractors, they jog along, keeping pace with the light field pieces that are drawn by well-trained horses. These big guns, as now constructed, are the last word in mobility. No need to worry about building emplacements for them. They can be fired from any sort of ground, and If things get tod hot for them in one place they can be coupled up and hauled off to another. Along with the big guns go complete outfits of repair material and machinery, so that if anything goes wrong it can be attended to without a minute’s delay. Nothing known to modern war is so

pampered, so delicately nursed, as -a big field howitzer, unless, perhaps, it be a superdreadnaught or a temperamental Missouri mule. And when <.ne of these delicate intruments gets Into range, that Is. so that It isn’t necessary to fire more than half way across a good-sized middle Western county, it can do an amount of business that quite (Justifies all the trouble it has required. A six-inch howitzer will drop an explosive shell everyten seconds, ami drop It exactly where it will do the most harm. Their accuracy in firing is almost unbelievable and quite indescribable. The biggest of them are manned by crews of naval gunners, trained to shoot from the unstable deck of battleship or cruiser and to hit the nuuk. When they get a chance on dry land which doesn't roll or sway beneath them it becomes highly undesirable to attract the diligent attention of one pf these crews within ten or a dozen miles. All this is a mild suggestion of what went wrong with the Hindenburg line. It was undoubtedly a mighty good line —once. But the engineers and mifChine shops behind the French and British armies had made their arrangements for wrecking it long before Hindenburg had even thought of establishing it.