Crisis in the Caucasus

"No natural obstacle can prevent enemy advances unless it is backed up by fire power and men."

With this aphorism Red Star last week admonished the Red Army and illumined the crisis which it faces as the Germans roll southeast through the Caucasus into Russia's richest oilfields. Already the Germans had taken the Maikop fields and were thrusting into the Grozny region, only 100 miles from the Caspian. Thus far they had followed a railway paralleling the Greater Caucasus range, which towers east to west between the Caspian and Black Seas. Marshal Fedor von Bock was apparently taking the classic invasion route, by way of the Caspian coastal plain to Baku. There were only three other routes, all difficult. One was the narrow Black Sea coast, where the mountains almost tumble into the sea. The second was the Georgian Military Road, twisting up through narrow defiles and a pass 7,823 feet high before it falls southward to Tiflis. The third, equally precipitous, crosses the same range between the coastal route and the Georgian Highway.

The mountains offered the Red Army a magnificent chance to stop the Germans, if, instead of depending passively on terrain to do the job, they made aggressive use of their greater knowledge of hidden valleys and obscure roadways, of their opportunities for ambush and sudden flank attack, of the fact that German air power is less useful in the mountains than on level battlefields.

Red Star's admonition indicated that the Red Army Command was well aware of its big chance. If the German tide broke against the mountains, Russia would have salvaged something from this year's fighting. Baku, would yield some 13,000,000 barrels of oil monthly. There would be no direct shipping route to the main Red Army, but there would still be a waterway up the Caspian to the Ural River, another across the Caspian to the Krasnovodsk terminus of the Turk-Sib railway, which loops northward through Central Asia to Samara and the Middle Volga.

Of more importance later would be the fact that, behind the Caucasus defenders' backs, were growing armies of the United Nations in Iraq and Iran.

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