Monday, Jan. 04, 1943

History Without Mercy

Last week the Red Army achieved its greatest offensive successes of the war--successes which may lead to victory in Russia. The fact that the Red Army had the men, weapons and skill for these advances testified to the acumen of Joseph Stalin and his military command in a year which might have brought defeat to Russia (see p. 21).

But, as never before, it was difficult for Russia's allies to see the winter battles as they were, rather than as they may eventually be. Once again, in dispatches brimming with winter hope, possibilities became actualities and distant objectives were made to seem very near. The Red Army was advancing--but it was well behind the world's headlines.

Its initial infiltrations (see map) were still to be consolidated and the decisive battles were still to be fought, for if the Axis armies were divided, so were the separate Russian columns. Only when the Russians have regained full possession of all the chief rail routes can their driving winter offensive capitalize on its possibilities.

Greatest of these possibilities is the recapture of Rostov, the southern railway and factory city which the Russians lost and regained last year, then lost again last July. If the Russians once more take Rostov, the Germans in the Caucasus will be in immediate danger of losing their last route of supply or escape; the isolation of the Axis armies in the Don bend and at Stalingrad will then be complete. But Rostov last week was only the eventual objective of a campaign which was just beginning.

Fury in Fluid. A hopeful sign for the future was the Red Army's new way of fighting. Long the masters and victims of defensive warfare with infantry masses, the Russians now appeared to have mastered fluid, offensive warfare. Strong tank and motorized artllery columns plunged as much as 30 miles ahead of the infantry --a totally new departure for the Red Army, all the more remarkable because it was accomplished in winter snows. By painful study, the Red Army Command had adapted the Germans' Panzer technique, and had now applied it when & where the Germans least expected this form of attack.

It was a kind of warfare which required much that the Red Army up to now had lacked: great numbers of trucks and other motorized equipment, the means and ability to keep huge supplies of gasoline and munitions moving up behind advancing forces. Upon this supply system, now functioning under difficulties, the outcome of the Russian offensives may depend.

For his tank successes, Lieut. General Vassily Mikhailovich Badanov this week received the Order of Suvorov, a new decoration for commanders. Commander of the drive down the Rostov railway was one of the few Russian soldiers known in the U.S.: Lieut. General Filip Ivanovich Golikov, who headed a Soviet military mission in Washington in 1941.

Fury on the Flanks. For the time being, the Red Army's earlier offensives on the Moscow front and at Stalingrad seemed to be great flank assaults, diverting the Germans from the drives in the middle Don. At Rzhev and other points on the Moscow front the Red Army still battered at the Germans' interlaced strong points in a prolonged battle of attrition. Near Stalingrad U.P.'s Correspondent Henry Shapiro (see p. 40) discovered a mounting wave of confidence, along with evidence that the Russian armies were nearer defeat last September than the world then knew. Last week they held their lines on the Don's east bank. They slowly drove southward in an advance (toward Kotel-nikov) which tightened the grip on the Germans at Stalingrad. Stones in Berlin. In the areas of the chief Russian drives the Germans admitted that they had to "shorten their lines." They said that the Russians had opened some gaps; they failed to claim that all the holes had been closed. But nowhere did the Germans attempt strategic retreats, or show the slightest sign that they intended to withdraw to safer winter lines. Wherever Axis troops lost a position, they gave it up only when they were killed, wounded or captured. The Axis forces had to depend more & more upon air transport, but they still had alternate lines of supply to all the armies--and would have them until the key junction points west of the Don were seized. The Germans' worries showed less in their accounts of the battles than in their home propaganda. Said Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels: "We are spared nothing. History is quite without grace or mercy. . . . Wherever we look, we see mountains of problems which must be mastered by us. Everywhere the path ascends at a steep and dangerous angle, and nowhere is there a shady spot where we may stay and rest."

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