Turn on the Don

This week on the Stalingrad front, the Russians scored their biggest victory in nearly a year. In its immediate scope and consequences, the victory was "local"--the culmination of a prolonged, hitherto indecisive effort to relieve Stalingrad itself by blows at the Germans' flanks and rear, between the Volga and the Don. But its full possibilities, if realized--which they are still to be--might be immense. Disrupting Germany's winter line in the south, blocking the diversion of Nazi forces to the Mediterranean, perhaps cutting off the Germans in the Caucasus, were among the conceivable consequences of a complete Russian victory.

In the first three days of the Russian advances, the Red Army's gains were both impressive and promising. Marshal Semion Timoshenko's troops, attacking northwest and southwest of Stalingrad, broke through in two places and drove 50 miles to the western banks of the Don, and then 90 miles beyond. The Russians routed half a dozen German divisions, captured hundreds of artillery pieces, killed some 26,000 Germans and captured 24,000 others.

The Russians also took strategic cities (Abganerovo and Kalach, on the Don) and--most important of all--cut both railroad lines used by the Germans to supply their army at Stalingrad. The ends of two Russian spearheads were less than 50 miles apart. If Marshal Timoshenko drew them together, the entire German siege force at Stalingrad might be trapped.

The operation was beautifully timed, both with the Allied offensives in Africa, and with a less spectacular advance in the Voronezh sector, the Red Army's Don toe hold about 300 miles northwest of Stalingrad. In effect the Germans were confronted on the Don with two major attacks at once. At other points on the 2,000-mile front the Red Army achieved other local successes.

An unknown factor was the true nature of the Germans' winter plans. If, for example, they had deliberately withdrawn troops from Stalingrad's rear toward the Don and prepared for a stand there, the Russian advances might not have been a complete shock to Hitler. The facts remained that the Red Army had shown its best offensive generalship to date, that it had punctured the Germans' Don-Volga line, and that the battle was not yet over.

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