No. 3

The Russians struck again, and in their third winter drive they again made great initial gains. And again, as on the central front before Moscow, they struck where the Germans had expected an attack: on the middle Don, behind the positions where the Red Army and the Germans were locked west of Stalingrad.

In its first stages, the third offensive was in effect an extension of the drive to relieve Stalingrad. But as the Russian thrust widened, it also became an effort to destroy the Germans' entire system of communications and supply in the Ukraine, to endanger Axis forces both in the Don-Volga area and in the Caucasus. The great object of the Red Army's winter strategy was now clear: to slice up the Germans' winter lines, keep the Wehrmacht on the defensive from Rzhev to the Caucasus.

To this extent the Russians appeared to be succeeding. How much more they had gained in German forces defeated and new positions taken was not clear from the Moscow and Berlin communiques. The Russians said that since Nov. 19 they had killed and captured 273,500 Germans, Rumanians, Hungarians, Italians. Berlin communiques gave a possible indication that the Luftwaffe was in trouble: the claimed ratio of German and Russian losses declined from 12-to-1 to 4-to-1. But there was no conclusive news.

Germans waiting at home got no cheer. Their radios and newspapers told them to be "under no delusion about the seriousness of the fighting." A German radio propagandist moaned about the Red Army's "enormous mass of tanks" and admitted that the German army's situation at Stalingrad was "temporarily of a serious nature." German newspapers prepared their readers for "a war of many years" in Russia. Whoever was winning the battles last week, the Germans, by their own admission, were not winning the war.

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