Definition of Disaster

The gains of summer were now nearly consumed by the losses of winter. Berlin's communiques intoned a refrain: "In order to shorten the front . . . the German troops, obeying orders, are withdrawing to a new, shortened line. . . . Movements of our troops continued without interruption by the enemy. . . ."

For Germans at home, bombarded by official pessimism in order to screw them up to maximum effort, the most fearful fact of all was that their propaganda was true. The Axis armies in Russia were indeed shortening their lines--shortening them so far that nearly all the gains of 1942 were already lost, shortening them to the point where further retreats might invite disaster.

Voronezh to Kursk. The line that the Germans hoped to hold in the south became fairly clear. If they could keep Kursk and Kharkov--the starting points of their summer drive--and retain a line swerving southeastward to Rostov, they would still have the main arteries of their principal supply system and most of the industrially rich Donets basin. Fortnight ago, the Red Army seemed to have a chance to threaten this "last line." This week, after they completed the repossession of Voronezh and swept westward, the Russians were actually attacking the outer bastions of that line near Kursk and Belgorod. To the south, beyond Kharkov, the Germans' maximum hope was to hold a bulge protecting that key city and the northern approaches to Rostov. Of these objectives, the greatest gain for the Russians and the greatest loss to the Germans would be Kharkov, fulcrum of the entire Axis line lying between the Red armies in the south and the outer defenses of the Reich itself. Second in importance was Rostov--a vital gate to the Caucasus and the Crimea and a point which the Germans seized and lost once before.

The Donets basin is the greatest prize the Germans have won in Russia. If they have to retreat from Rostov, giving up the eastern half of the basin, they could still try to hold a straightened version of the Kharkov-Mariupol line from which they started last year, and the richer western half of the basin would still be German. Any retirement beyond that line, meaning the sacrifice of all the Donets area, could be attributed only to utter defeat.

The Caucasian Campaign was for oil, and last week the Germans lost Maikop, the only oil center they had captured. They also lost a controlling point (Tikhoretsk) on the rail line connecting Rostov with the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk, the Germans' only alternate way of retreat from the Caucasus, and that alternative was itself being threatened near Krasnodar. The Stalingrad area had been almost cleared (see below), releasing troops and freeing rail lines for the Rostov battles.

In the whole south of Russia the Axis had little left to show for 1942. From Voronezh to the sea, the Axis lines had been shortened very nearly to the breaking point.

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