Lateral Passes

Mobile warfare is always a contest for communications, but never is it more so than during the dead of winter. Last week winter in Russia had reached its height: it was the brittle time that the Russians call "the Christening Frost." Along with the cold, Russian success in cutting German communications also reached a height.

Railways were now the only sure means of communication. Slow-moving artillery and infantry were now the only sure weapons of attack. It was for railways that the Russians were driving hardest, and they were succeeding, thanks to their superiority in artillery and infantry.

The important lines to cut were the lateral lines, which the enemy used to shift power from sector to sector of the front. Last week the Russians struck at Germany's lateral lines in four places:

P:The greatest success of the week, like the greatest successes of the war, belonged to wily Marshal Semion Timoshenko. He sent his men on an oblique, ten-day, 65-mile plunge into the Donets Basin. His aim was to cut direct communications between the great center of Kharkov and the south. This he did at Lozovaya.*

P:Farther south, the Russians pulled another sneak near the Sea of Azov, advancing 115 miles beyond German-held Taganrog. Here their ultimate aim was to choke oft' German communications into the vital Crimea.

P:On the central front, they drove for the important Smolensk-Bryansk line.

P:Up north, where bright-faced Marshal Klimente E. Voroshilov was back in action after organizing new armies to the rear, the Russians drove their spectacular wedge between the Moscow and Leningrad fronts a little deeper. This drive had already cut the lateral line from Leningrad to the central front.

These attacks pointed up the difference between Russia's bad-weather tactics and Germany's fair-weather tactics. The Russians drive wedges, hoping to cut communications and make the enemy fall back. The Germans drive wedges and bend them into encirclements, hoping to cut off the enemy and destroy him. In the difference may lie the future of Russia.

*At Lozovaya Timoshenko's troops were only 62 miles from Dnepropetrovsk and the site of the once great, now ruined Dnieper Dam. The Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic last week announced that before the dam was dynamited to render it useless to the Germans (TIME, Sept. 1), its 740,000-h.p. turbines and other power machinery had been dismantled and moved eastward to safety.

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