Odessa Pocket

During the first plunge forward there had been the great Battle of Bialystok-Minsk; during the second phase, the great Battle of Smolensk. Last week the great Battle of the Ukraine raged.

The Battle of the Ukraine was a gigantic flanking operation with the Germans going deep into the stretch between the Bug and Dnieper Rivers, then swinging south to encircle the Russians at the Black Sea ports. Frontally the German gains eastward were out of all linear proportion to the great flanking sweeps which made the gains possible. A great break-through near Uman, 120 miles south of Kiev, paved the way for the final dash south to the Black Sea. By week's end the Germans claimed to have rolled across the Krivoi Rog iron-ore area, which had supplied 59% of Russia's raw iron, and to have reached the sea east of Odessa and the port of Nikolaev.

The Reds were in a bag, the Germans claimed. They would have to stand and fight, or tumble, Dunkirk-wise, into the Black Sea. According to Moscow, the Germans spoke too soon. The greater part of the Red Army of the Ukraine had made an orderly retreat, were outside the sack, were crossing the Dnieper to take up new positions.

To divert the home folks, the German news agency D.N.B. estimated that the German Armies had occupied 388,185 square miles. This, the estimators said (forgetting the German dictum that geographical advance is not so important as military annihilation), was more than twice the area of old Germany. They failed to add that it was less than one-twentieth of Russia.

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