Victory Has Many Wounds

In one of the most remarkable documents of World War II--a summary of the Red Army's great winter offensives in the south--the Russians said last week: >The single objective of all the southern offensives was to "surround and defeat the German troops at Stalingrad." > "This plan was carried out in November and December, 1942."

With an air of triumph and finality, the Russians spoke wholly in the past tense, as though the battles of 1943's first week were postscripts to a victory already won.

But the victory was not won, and the Russians in their second winter of war knew it better than most. The Germans at Stalingrad were surrounded (see map), but they were not yet defeated. What the Red Army had won, but had yet to exploit, were positions and advantages which may eventually doom the Wehrmacht. Said Moscow Author Ilya Ehrenburg, preparing the Russian people for greater struggles:

"Victory is not a marble statue. It is not poetry. It is not a lottery. Victory has many wounds, and eyes burning from sleepless nights."

Doom in the South? At Stalingrad a Red Army correspondent found Russian soldiers walking abroad in the winter daylight, out of their subterranean shelters, commanding whole blocks of shattered buildings and recaptured streets where no German bullets flew. Now, he said, it was the encircled Germans who burrowed into cellars, turned into "bearded beasts" and subsisted on short rations of horse meat. Now it was the Germans who were pressed between Red troops on every side, as the Russians had been pressed between the Germans and the Volga.

But Moscow dispatches noted two significant facts: 1) as of last week, the Germans held two positions on the Volga--the chief aim of their drive for Stalingrad; 2) of the 22 Axis divisions caught in and near the city, 20 were German divisions; only two were Rumanian.

According to the official Russian summary, the bulk of the 312,650 Axis troops killed and captured, the 36 divisions "routed" in the southern offensive, were Rumanian and Italian. At some points of the Russians' first advances, satellite troops outnumbered the Germans 5-to-2. This probably explained the bag of 137,650 prisoners--the first such claims ever made by the Red Army. Cracking the 20 all-German divisions at Stalingrad will be a tougher task.

On the chill and windy Kalmuck steppes south of Stalingrad, where the Russians had narrowly repulsed a German counteroffensive, the Red Army still advanced last week. It drove down the Stalingrad-Caucasus railway, took the Germans' strong defense-point at Kotelnikov, and rolled on southward. The Russians said that these operations, like those on the Middle Don and northwest of Stalingrad, were part of the great plan to defeat the Germans on the Volga. The accompanying threat to other German armies in the Caucasus was real enough, but by Moscow's own account it was a future threat.

Darker omens for the Germans were 1) the failure of their counteroffensive below Stalingrad; 2) the Red Army's recapture of Mozdok, an important oil and railway town in the Caucasus. If the Germans lacked the reserves and hitting power for an effort which might have retrieved their whole southern position, they were evidently in worse straits than Berlin dared to admit. The Germans' loss of Mozdok, plus frequent references in the Moscow communiques to "rearguard" actions along the southern front, may have meant that the Wehrmacht was withdrawing to new winter lines and giving up much that it won this summer.

Doom in the North? In the snows west of Moscow the Russians claimed the first important success of their offensive on the central front. They said (and the Germans at first denied) that they had taken the Axis fortress and railway-junction town of Velikie Luki. According to Moscow, every German soldier fought until he was killed.

Moscow dispatches reported a subsequent drive to within 70 miles of the Latvian border. But the importance of the capture was twofold: 1) it cracked the great Axis defense salient, hinging on Rzhev-Smolensk-Vyazma; 2) it prepared the way for assault on a railway which supplies the besiegers of Leningrad.

Orphans' Winter. The Russians have a phrase for the winter of their greatest success. They call it "Orphans' Winter" because, as Russian winters go, it has been a mild one, kindly to the thousands of homeless children in Russia. The snows have been deep--but not too deep for tanks. It has been cold--but not so cold as it was last winter, when Germans froze at their guns.

Last week the Germans told two stories about this winter. One, explaining the reverses to Germans at home, was that it was again a murderous season. The other account, for the Allied peoples, was that it was a merciful winter, not at all a menace to the Axis or a source of hope for Hitler's enemies.

For once the Germans were telling the truth in their foreign broadcasts. The mild winter enabled the Russians to maneuver their new armored corps (see col. 3), yet it was Russian enough to freeze the lakes, swamps and rivers, turning them into roadways for the Red Army. It also did these things for the Germans. If victory comes to the Russians in the winter of 1942-43, Russia will owe the victory to the Red Army.

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