AXIS HOPES AND PLANS

As the German leaders looked toward the future in the early spring of 1943, there were both good and bad prospects. The good prospects were of two types. They had stalled off disasters and they were bringing on new weapons. After the great defeat at Stalingrad, they had reversed the tide temporarily with a counter-stroke which offered at least the hope of their being able to launch a new offensive in the East. In North Africa, the outlook was grim for the Axis forces in March—the month of German victory at Kharkov in the East—but at least they had prevented a quick Allied victory which would quite probably have paved the way for a summer or fall 1943 landing in the West. Even if a successful Allied offensive in Tunisia were followed by other such operations in the Mediterranean area, a substantial amount of time had been gained.

Furthermore, new weapons were beginning to come off the assembly lines in large numbers. The production of submarines was at last reaching the levels required to keep about one hundred at sea at any one time. The new Tiger heavy tanks were getting their early troubles fixed; the new Panther medium-heavy tanks were beginning to be delivered; and there was every prospect that, during the course of the year, monthly output of these and other critical weapons—assault guns in particular— would steadily increase. Perhaps of greatest importance was the effect of manpower mobilization. The combination of rationalization in industry and massive employment of prisoners of war and slave laborers was making it possible to provide added manpower to the army, so that by the summer of 1943 the army in the East was at least close to its size two years earlier.

The efforts of the Finns, Hungarians and Romanians to discover an exit from the war had been effectively squelched by the Germans. The submarine war was expected to keep the Western Allies immobilized in 1943; and there was the expectation that during that year the recovery on the southern part of the Eastern Front, combined with the resources freed by the withdrawals from the Demyansk and Rzhev salients would make possible a great attack on at least one section of the Eastern Front.