The Time Is Now

(See Cover)

This week the clock struck. The time for Hitler's great attempt to crush Russia had come.

For Hitler has no second year in which to conquer Russia. He has at most four months, perhaps only three, in which Russia must be conquered or the war will be lost to Germany. From his standpoint, Russia must be liquidated as an enemy before the U.S. can throw its real weight into the war. Hitler must beat Russia in time to allow the German war machine to turn and meet the enemy in the West.

These basic facts were known when the Nazi High Command sat down to plan the German campaign of 1942. They are axioms which must have been burned into the military brain of Hitler's No. 1 strategist, Generaloberst Franz Haider, Chief of the German Army's General Staff.

He and the General Staff, anonymous servants of German arms, men who let higher-ranking field commanders take the glory while they take the basic responsibility, faced a well-defined problem.

This time they had to pin down the Russian army in order to crush it, for the Russians can even now retreat 1,000 miles without even reaching the Ural industrial area. To do this, the Germans had to be free to attack along the whole 2,000-mile battlefront. For this the Germans had to wait for good weather. Not until mid-June can the ground be counted on to be fit and hard in the north around Leningrad (a month later than in the Ukraine).

With this starting-time limit and the necessity of finishing before another winter, General Haider and his staff had to devise a plan for crushing Russia in a few months' time--a campaign as crushing as those against Poland in 1939 and France in 1940, a campaign better than the blitz-that-failed against Russia in 1941. This had to be the greatest thunderbolt of all and it had to strike on time.

Failure would almost certainly be loss of the war. But the prize of success was freedom to turn the German Wehrmacht loose on Britain and the U.S.--probably to take all Asia, possibly to take most of Africa, perhaps to take Britain itself.

After One Year. This week was the anniversary of Germany's first attack on Russia, and General Haider had the lessons of the first year's failures to help him in making his second year's plans.

After twelve months the Germans had occupied about 7% (some 580,000 sq. mi.) of Russia's land, but they had not conquered Russia. They had destroyed or captured upwards of 4,500,000 Red soldiers, 15,000 Red tanks, 9,000 Red planes. But they had not destroyed the Red Army. German artillerymen photographed Leningrad through their telescopes. But they had not captured Leningrad, with its mastery of the Baltic, its way to Murmansk and the Murmansk supply route. The swastika flew within 115 miles of Moscow. But the Germans had not tak en the U.S.S.R.'s heart and capital, the vast railway system which rays out from Moscow and serves most of Russia.

German armies poised on the outer borders of the industrial Donets Basin. But they did not have its mines, power plants and factories, or its roads to Caucasian oil. The Germans had forced a huge segment of Russia's industry back into the Urals, but they had not even won the approaches to that rear reservoir of might, where Russia's armies could be partly supplied even if most of Russia was lost. The Germans had the Crimea, they had Kerch on the Black Sea. But on their anniversary date they did not yet--not quite --have Sevastopol, the fortress which controls the Black Sea.

Above all, they did not have the Caucasus and its oil. An oft-told tale is Hitler's compelling need of oil, the abundance of which beckons him to Maikop and Baku. But another fact also draws him southward to the Caucasus: the Russians, too, must have Caucasian oil.

With the limited time available for reaching these goals, the Germans had to make all possible preparations in advance of their great offensive. All along the 2,000-mile front, from Murmansk to the Sea of Azov, innumerable local chores of war have been done. The World has heard echoes of these preparatory struggles in the news from the Kharkov front last month, in the tidings of skirmishes and minor battles last week below Leningrad, on the Moscow front, in the Kalinin area near Smolensk west of the capital, below Kharkov where the Nazis advanced. Greatest of them all was the battle for Sevastopol, whose seizure was both a necessary conclusion to the Nazis' Crimean conquest and an essential prelude to further drives in the south.

The Price Is Paid. "So now you have seen the defenders of Sevastopol. . . . The principal, joyous thought you have brought away with you is a conviction of the strength of the Russian people; and this conviction you gained, not by looking at all those traverses, breastworks, cunningly interlaced trenches, mines, cannon, one on top of the other, of which you could make nothing; but you have received it from the eyes, words and actions--in short, from seeing what is called 'the spirit'--of the defenders of Sevastopol. What they do is all done so simply . . . that you feel convinced they could do a hundred times as much. . . ."

So wrote a young officer of the siege of Sevastopol. His name was Count Leo Tolstoy, and the siege was during the Crimean War.

In Leo Tolstoy's day, the enemy dead--and the victors, after 127,000 Russians had fallen --were British and French. Last week a more dreadful foe, with more dreadful weapons, attacked and died and still attacked the deep defenses around the city. Leo Tolstoy's distant kinsman, Alexei, wrote in Red Star: "Now at Sevastopol there is no air fit to breathe because of the decaying bodies of German and Rumanians." Hitler's Colonel General Fritz Erich von Manstein drove his men ever closer, over the mounds of their dead, and a U.S. correspondent cabled: "The question at Sevastopol is not whether the Germans can take it, but how much they can afford to pay for it."

The Germans paid. They wanted Sevastopol for great strategic reasons, and they particularly wanted it this week for a political reason: on June 22 German armies had been in Russia one year, the German people had not yet received their promised victory, and Adolf Hitler sorely needed an anniversary triumph to stiffen them for the great campaign to come.

The Armies Are Ready. Yet the spectacle of death at Sevastopol is only the overture for what is to come. In spirit, in the will to win or die, the Red Army has no superior. Just how it stands in effective numbers and vital weapons only the Soviet High Command knows. But two facts are known: 1) Russia is anxiously urging the U.S. to increase the flow of supplies; 2) since May, wherever the German and Russian armies have met in force, the Germans have won.

What London and Washington do know, within broad limits, is the general strength and distribution of the German armies:*

> On the northern front, from Murmansk to Staraya Russa below Leningrad--nearly 1,000,000 men in 35 German divisions (including three Panzers), twelve Finnish divisions, two Italian divisions.

> On the central front (Moscow, Kalinin, Rzhev, Vyazma, Bryansk)--over 850,000 men in 40 German divisions (including four Panzers), two Italian divisions and one Spanish.

> On the southern front (Kharkov to the Crimea)--about 1,300,000 men in 50 German divisions (including eight Panzers), 14 Rumanian and two Italian divisions.

> In reserve (in the occupied Ukraine, White Russia, the Baltic, Poland, East Prussia)--more than 1,500,000 men in 70 German divisions (including at least four Panzers and probably more), six Rumanian and four Italian divisions.

>In the Luftwaffe, now mainly in the south--about 6,000 front-line planes in three air fleets of 2,000 each.

Anti-Nazis liked to believe that the German armies were shells, that the stalemate and horror of the Russian winter had left them listless and broken. The Germans themselves have admitted 1,500,000 casualties. Perhaps Russia can discount the Spaniards and Italians; undoubtedly some of the Germans who bore winter's brunt were shaken in body and spirit. But the attack on Sevastopol was not the act of broken men; even the enslaved Rumanians fought and died by the thousands, along with their German masters. Last week Correspondent Leland Stowe interviewed recently captured Germans in Russia. Then he wrote:

"Psychologically, they are about as near being knocked out as Joe Louis in the third round--certainly no nearer. We in America and Britain, especially in our armed forces, had better face this fact. Any illusions about an early collapse inside Hitler's forces will only invite disaster. . . . Their spirits are unbroken, their wills stubborn and hard. . . . They will fight desperately, knowing that Germany loses everything, at least in their generation's lifetime, unless they win."

The Plan Is Ready. Gigantic problems now face Hitler in Russia: on a stupendous front his armies confront not only determined, well-armed foes (who probably outnumber the Nazis), but line upon line of prepared defenses in the rear, blocking every mile of his primary roads to Moscow and the south, his secondary objective in the north.

Against such defenses, the typical blitz--the quick shock, the breakthrough, the spearing advance by planes, tanks and mobile artillery, then the followup by infantry--will not serve as it did in Poland, in the Lowlands, in Russia's first months. Now, in depth and thorough preparation, the Russian defenses are stronger than those which slowed the Nazi drive last fall, then stopped it with winter's paralyzing help. But, if Stalin and his staff have learned how to crack the 1940-model blitz. Hitler's generals have had many months to study Soviet defense. Moscow's hardheaded commanders can only assume that the Germans have a plan, that the plan is ready, that it is in scale with the German task.

The German armies, in their preparatory spring attacks, have already shown a few new tricks. Essence of these new tactics is to choose a very narrow sector, smash the selected area with a maximum concentration of planes (the Russians counted 1,000 on a 15-mile line below Kharkov), then strike with closely integrated formations of artillery, infantry and tanks. Full-strength Panzers have not attempted to dart through the enemy lines, swirl at will in the Russian rear. Instead, the Germans apparently keep their tanks in smaller groups, close to artillery and infantry. Thus, while the German pace may be slow, it is calculated to keep concentrated columns intact, always with enough strength to protect themselves from the surrounding Russians. At Kharkov these tactics worked so well that Moscow had to admit a continued Nazi advance. At Sevastopol the Germans' brute concentration of men & metal brought that fortress to the verge of collapse in 16 days.

It is possible that the recent variations in German tactics have been merely a change of pace, perhaps partly caused by the desire to husband tanks. Considering the size of the battlefield and the size of the Russian armies--and the tendency shown in every previous campaign in World War II for General Halder to lay plans on a grand scale--the Nazi plan for 1942 may well call for break-throughs and encirclements on a huge scale.

There are many opportunities for such attacks (see map). A major drive in the center might take Moscow and, sweeping on, outflank the entire southern front. A major drive in the south may strike directly at the Caucasus or swing north to outflank the central front. A drive in the far north might cut the lines of Allied aid from Murmansk and Archangel. A major drive through or around Turkey may cut off the Russian back door through Persia or swing south to attack Suez.

There are possible variations upon these themes. Several such drives may be launched at once, some of them real, some feints. Any two adjoining drives can become a pincers movement. Whatever the plan, it is certain to be breathtaking.

The Planner Is Ready. Adolf Hitler tells the German Army, Air Force and Navy where to fight. Sometimes he tells them when to fight. But General Halder and his small, thoroughly professional group of aides tell them how to fight.

Colonel General Halder belongs to a canny group of officers who cottoned to the Nazis when Hitler first came to power. While the Army's Prussian and Junker aristocrats stood aloof, the middle-class opportunists made friends at Brown House, successfully ignored the atrocities there and enjoyed Nazi favor long before the Prussian-ruled Reichswehr capitulated. Now they rate highly with Hitler: Jodl, of the Fuehrer's personal staff; Dietl, who commands the extreme northern front in Russia; List, who probably now commands the central front.

Many Germans think that Colonel General Halder had a lot to do with the distribution last year of some curious documents called "Elucidations of Communiques." Their discreetly veiled gist: "My God, let's be careful; Hitler is trying to be Napoleon." But, when Hitler displaced the Army's commander, Field Marshal von Brauchitsh, the change merely brought Halder closer to his Fuehrer.

Up to now in World War II, the product of Franz Halder's planning has always been a thunderbolt--the lightning that withered Poland, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France, the shaft that staggered Russia last year. Thunderbolts should strike on time. Hitler's time in Russia--his only time--is now. The world has a right to expect something terrific. If it should not strike, if it should not be terrific, then history will also be made. For then the Nazi war machine is in trouble and its days of glory are numbered.

* Information from inside Germany is nothing to brag about, but it is better than U.S.-British information from inside the U.S.S.R. The figures given here are as of early June.

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