The Snows of Yesteryear

The great, seething, bloody battle of Russia had entered a new phase. Last week, heartened by Anglo-American successes in Africa, Russian veterans were taking the initiative:

> Red Army units attacked on the Volkhov sector southeast of Leningrad, captured a village. Berlin long ago reported Russian concentrations in this area.

> German dispatches admitted that the Russians had recaptured Schlusselburg, south of Leningrad on Lake Ladoga, breaking the Axis ring around Leningrad after a year of siege.

> In battered Stalingrad, for the first time in three months, there was quiet for a few hours. Then the Germans staged an assault big enough to make small gains at great cost. But by this week they had been driven out of the two streets they had managed to capture.

Last week Berlin's radio complained that in the Stalingrad region the temperature had dropped to 29DEG F. below zero. Floating ice clogged the Volga, stopping Soviet shipping for the winter and robbing Hitler of the only bitter satisfaction he might have received from the whole Stalingrad adventure. Radiators froze; narrow-treaded German tanks slid along weakly on their bellies; breechblocks became stiff; transmission oil jelled.

Soviet scouts in the outskirts of Stalingrad bagged the season's first typical winter German. His head was wrapped in a woman's shawl looted from some Russian peasant hut. A threadbare blanket with a hole cut in the middle served him as a poncho. The Red Army men, dressed in the standard winter sheepskin shubas (coats), fleece-lined caps and warm valenki (knee-high felt boots), seized the shivering Fritz as he stood sentry duty over a zigzag trench full of freezing Germans. All he could mumble was "holodno" (cold).

Because of the weather or the demands of the Mediterranean front, the Luftwaffe became far less active. Soviet military dispatches reported that obsolete German planes were sputtering over the lines near Stalingrad to drop handfuls of small bombs and speed for home before Russian fighters arrived. During one 24-hour-period last week fewer than 200 enemy sorties over Russian lines were reported, compared with the previous daily average of 1,500 to 2,000.

Hitler's 1942 campaign to knock Russia out of the war, to win oil and Lebensraum, had ended without having achieved a single important strategic objective. Leningrad and Stalingrad still stood at two ends of a ragged, frozen, 1,000-mile front.

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