Storm Clouds Gather

American divisions had hammered the bulge flat. In retaking Monschau, the troops regained the last of the German towns taken by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt's winter offensive. Krewinkel, the last German-held town in easternmost Belgium, fell. Now a new phase was opening up.

The Germans looked across their lines and grew alarmed at what they saw. Their radio bleated that General Dwight D. Eisenhower' was making "frantic preparations" for a new drive, "with no effort to keep it a secret."

Pressure in the Center. To many a doughfoot it must have seemed that the Germans were reacting slowly, that a rather big push was already on. Along a 40-mile front east of the Ardennes some six divisions of Lieut. General Courtney Hodges' First Army, some four of Lieut. General George Patton's Third Army, were clawing their way through the saw-toothed tank traps, over the concrete pillboxes of the Siegfried Line.

Slowly the mercury climbed as the men worked forward through a rough country of dank forests, steep hills, sharp little valleys and winding streams. The snow that had blinded them during the German breakthrough, the ice that had immobilized their trucks turned into deep slush and mud through which they slid and slithered.

In some of the pillboxes the advancing soldiers found unarmed German families, refugees from the bomb-torn cities, cooking their meals. In others tough, battlewise German soldiers fought to the end. Troops of the gth Division had to storm the moats of a picturesque 14th-Century castle to dig out one stubborn Nazi formation.

Pressure in the South. Far to the south, Major General Jean Joseph Gabriel Delattre de Tassigny's French First Army (including American divisions), closed a pincers, cutting the Colmar pocket in two. Of some 10,000 Germans, all that were left of the 25,000 originally in the pocket, many were locked in the circle, others were pinned against the Rhine, whose bridges were being hammered by Allied planes. Allied troops entered Colmar.

But these were not the offensives worrying the Germans. Their spokesmen pointed northward, to the 40-mile stretch held by the Allies along the Roer where the guns of Lieut. Gen. William Hood Simpson's Ninth Army were already drumming a prelude to battles to come. Six new armored divisions, four new infantry divisions had suddenly appeared in this area, said the Nazi radio. The Allies, it added, were preparing for a smash across the Cologne plain to the Rhine.

As if clearing for action, Shaef spruced up its chain of command, announced a shift made last week. Back to Lieut. Gen. Omar D. Bradley 's 21st Army Group went the American First Army which had been shifted to Field Marshal Montgomery's 21st Group during the Battle of the Bulge. Shaef censors let out a delayed dispatch saying that the coiled American Ninth, also once part of Bradley's command, remained under Britain's Montgomery in the 12th Army Group.

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