Hitler is Winning

Battle Of Russia

Hitler is winning in Russia. If his armies continue to do as well as they did last week, and the Red Army does no better:

> Russia will be defeated.

> Germany will win the present phase of World War II in Europe.

> The best and the only present chance to destroy the main German armies will be gone; the Allies will then have lost their best chance to defeat Germany and win World War II.

This week these were the maximum dangers facing Russia, the U.S. and Great Britain. As yet they were only dangers. But the pace and power of the Germans in the first battles of their summer offensive, and the evident weakness of the Red Army at the places where the Nazis were strongest, made the dangers very real.

East to the Don. For their first main blow of summer at the Red Army, Hitler's generals had chosen a region of villages, sparsely wooded plains, and good tank country well south of Moscow and about 400 miles north of fallen Sevastopol (see p. 21). There, rivers were the only natural allies of the Red Army, and the rivers were not enough. This front, lying between Kursk on the north and Kharkov on the south, was placed so that at one stroke the Germans could drive for three objectives:

> The River Don, one of Russia's chief transportation arteries, essential to the Red Army and to Soviet industry.

> The Moscow-Rostov railway, which runs parallel to, and just west of, the Don along part of its course, connects the capital with southern Russia and the Caucasus, and, like the river, feeds much of Russia's industrial and military machine.

> Moscow itself. For the Germans driving eastward to the Don and the railway, were striking indirectly at Russia's heart, seeking to cut it off from the main body of the U.S.S.R. This tactic alone, if it succeeded, would be a crushing blow to Russia.

Mass v. Depth. Last week the Germans widened and joined the preliminary offensives which they had launched from Kharkov and Kursk (TIME, July 6). The struggles along the whole southern front thus became one battle, but it was fought in many separated sectors. In each Field Marshal Fedor von Bock faithfully followed the battle plan which the Nazis had devised to break up the Red Army's famed defense-in-depth: closely meshed, overpowering combinations of planes, tanks, artillery and infantry. Strong and deep though the Russian defenses were, the Nazi forces at the points of contact were even stronger.

Cannon fire from Russian Stormoviks wrecked Nazi tanks. The Russians' massed artillery, their infantry's deadly, two-man anti-tank guns, grenades and Molotov cocktails ripped up German armored columns as they did in last year's battles. But last week there were differences, and the differences favored the Germans. When the Red soldiers found a group of German tanks, they also found German artillery and mortars, bunched to answer the Russian fire. And, in vital sectors, Moscow had to admit that, for all the Red Army's brilliant artillery and anti-tank tactics, for all its carefully devised defense-in-depth, the Germans with their composite columns outnumbered the Russians in men and weapons. Ominous, too, was Moscow's statement that in at least one sector where the Russians retreated the Luftwaffe's control of the air and intensive front-line bombing turned the battle for the Nazis.

Sum & substance of last week's battle reports, from both Berlin and Moscow, was that the Red Army, not only in local sectors but on the entire front where the decisive battles were fought, lacked the planes, tanks, guns to match the German onslaught.

Timoshenko's Choice. Moscow this week confirmed Berlin's major claims: at some points the Germans had advanced 85 and 100 miles and more to the Don itself; German columns were converging toward the key city of Voronezh, just east of the Don, and midway between Moscow and Rostov on the all-important railway to the Caucasus.

Caught between these columns were great and now partially isolated segments of Marshal Semion Timoshenko's armies. A grave effect of the German strategy was to confront Timoshenko with several simultaneous Nazi fronts, further draining his limited totals of men and weapons, giving him the difficult choice of retreat or encirclement. He chose to retreat.

Pressure in the North. Although the Germans' main blow fell south of Moscow, their summer strategy, as it unfolded, embraced the whole Russian front. Near Borodino, where Napoleon won a Pyrrhic victory, Nazi artillery and infantry made just enough of a gesture to pin down the Red forces defending the capital to keep them from relieving Timoshenko. Then, on the Kalinin front northwest of Moscow, the Germans began still another drive. It was geared for speed: fleets of Luftwaffe transports swarmed into rear-line fields to supply the mobile Nazi forces. This served immediately to divert the Red Army from the crucial south; it was also a necessary preliminary to any attempt to encircle and conquer Moscow itself.

Near Leningrad the news was equally bad for Russia. Berlin and Moscow communiques, conflicting in detail, made one fact all too clear: Field Marshal Georg von Keuchler had smashed a Russian effort to drive a deep salient into the Nazi forces around the city, to compel them eventually to lift their siege. Berlin said that the Germans had destroyed the Russians' Second Shock Army; Moscow declared that the army was saved, admitted in effect that its effort to relieve Leningrad and forestall a summer offensive in the north had failed.

There is hope for the Red Army. At the worst, the Red Army might be defeated but not destroyed; it may, with Stalin and his Government, retire to Russia's great industrial reserve ground in the Urals. But a Russia merely holding out, cut off from its northern and Middle Eastern lines to its allies, would be no great threat to Germany. It is now clear that the Germans held their long winter front against the Red Army with some 25% of the total Nazi forces available for the Russian war. They could hold a weakened, narrowed Russian defensive front with even less.

The Allies' real hope is that the Russians did not have their main strength on the Kursk-Kharkov front, that they had saved their main reserves of men and material for a stand somewhere east of the Don. If this was true, then the U.S. and Great Britain might yet open a second air and land front in Europe in time to relieve Russia and the Red Army; the Germans might yet be halted before they had dismembered the U.S.S.R. and had driven on toward Caucasian oil and a juncture with Rommel in the pincered Middle East (see col. 3).

All this may be no wild and distant hope. But the blackest of all last week's black facts was that Russia and her allies had to fall back on hope.

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