How Many Rivers to Cross?

(See Cover)

New "victories are imminent after the fall of Rostov and Voroshilovgrad. The Red Army is already far west of the line between these two cities. In its irresistible sustained drive it has encircled large parts of Hitler's Army.--Moscow Radio.

It was hard to conceive what new victories would seem epic at the end of last week. For last week was the greatest, the happiest week of the war for Russia's armies. The triumphs of the week were dizzying. New possibilities were unfolded which a month ago would have seemed fantastic. The focus of war had suddenly moved westward. Men's eyes turned toward the Dnieper, toward the old borders of Russia--toward Berlin.

Success In Snow. What a young Russian general (Filip Ivanovich Golikov) accomplished on a limited Russian sector (Kursk) as the week opened seemed at first to be another wonderful but local success. Actually the way Kursk was captured and the consequences of its fall shed much light on Russian potentialities.

A snowstorm had been raging for several days. On the day when Colonel General Golikov's campaign opened there was such a whirling blizzard that a Russian correspondent's car took three hours to negotiate a quarter-mile. The Germans, sure that human beings would not fight on such a day, crawled into their dugouts and turned their backs on war.

The Russians advanced. They staggered forward, blinded by snow and bending over their green-lit compasses. In the forests they felt for tree trunks for guidance and support. Their frozen greatcoats crackled like splitting boards. When the Russians reached the napping defenders far east of Kursk, they charged and quickly captured batteries that fired not a shell.

Having won the first round by surprise, the Russians pressed their advantages. Sticking to the roads, they pushed through to the northwest of Kursk, and moved into positions to the northeast and southeast. Planes dropped pamphlets showing pictures of the captured Field Marshal von Paulus at Stalingrad and describing the slow strangulation there. The three groups attacked concentrically. Kursk fell so fast that even the Russians must have been surprised.

Success in Bulk. That was the signal for a general crumbling of what had been for over a year a rigid, unbreakable line. On both Colonel General Golikov's front and that to the south under Nikolai Vatutin, who was last week promoted from Colonel General to Army General, the Reds exploited their advantage. Belgorod fell. So did Lozovaya, Voroshilovsk, Voroshilovgrad, Likhaya. The attackers rolled around Kharkov, which like Kursk had been one of the main fortresses on Germany's great wall of last winter. Russians crept early this week to within seven miles of Kharkov, and the city's fall seemed imminent. It was all surprisingly easy. The hedgehogs seemed to be walking away in the snow, shedding only a few barbed quills.

Success in Fire. As a climax to a week of climaxes, Rostov, the southern anchor of the whole German line and a bitterly defended place, burst into flames and fell to the attackers. Thus the Germans lost the one sure foothold for an attack in the Caucasus in the spring. Rostov's loss was the clearest indication yet that there might not be another German offensive in Russia, since any offensive would have to start all over again on a program which had once failed.

Success in Fluidity? All this suggested that the Germans on the southern front had been forced to go over (as Rommel did when he left El Alamein) from rigid to elastic defense. They had been forced to do so because of the Russian mastery of winter tactics and because of their own fear of encirclement.

Elastic defense can be masterful, as Rommel's retreat to Tunisia was, or merely chaotic. The Russians had two chances of making it chaotic--they could drive south through Stalin to the Sea of Azov, pocketing the routed defenders of Rostov, and west from Lozovaya to the Dnieper bend at Dniepropetrovsk, cutting the Caucasian remnant and Crimean garrisons off from convenient retreat by rail or good roads.

If the Germans succeeded in some masterful withdrawals, it was possible that they might marshal reserves at some line of their choosing--perhaps along the Dnieper--and counterstrike at the then extended Russians. Since the Russians had again done their best work in their worst winter weather, and since the thaws of southern Russia produce a mud which is beyond description, the Germans probably look forward to a slackening of Russian momentum in a month or six weeks.

Fears. This uncertainty as to how far the Russians might be able to go gave rise to a curious reaction in Britain and the U.S. Many voices, some nervously, some skeptically, asked the question: Just what kind of victory does Russia want? The question arose from two mutually contradictory fears. One group seemed to fear that the Red advance would sweep to Russia's old borders and stop, leaving the German fox still dangerously alive, the Allies holding a still-empty bag. The other group feared that the Red advance would sweep to and perhaps beyond the Rhine, that all Europe would be Bolshevized.

The first school thinks Joseph Stalin may be playing a sly, lone, isolationist hand. It points out parallels, such as Kutuzov's reply to the British observer Wilson when the latter urged the Russian to destroy Napoleon instead of merely pursuing him. "Kutuzov told him plainly," says Eugene Tarle (Napoleon's Invasion of Russia), "that his aim was to eject Napoleon from Russia and that he did not see why Russia should waste her forces on the complete destruction of Napoleon, since the harvest of such a victory would be reaped by England, not Russia."

The other (Red-menace) school is exemplified by a recent editorial in the New York Daily News: "It is a cinch bet that the much discussed postwar policing of Germany will be done by the Russians. . . . Stalin will accomplish what Hitler tried to do--dominate all Europe. The effect of all this on us will be to leave us in as much danger from Europe as we were before this war."

Which, if either, of the apprehensive schools is within a light-year of the truth? What kind of victory does Russia want? The only way even to approximate an answer at this stage, besides examining the nature of the Red successes and their potentialities, is to estimate what Stalin and his Army want, review the known facts as to what Stalin's Government has said it wants.

Front Commander. In trying to gauge how far the Russians can go, it is important to try to see what her military men want. They all seem to want: terrible punishment of the Nazis.

Filip Ivanovich Golikov, a typical front commander, seems to want that. He is young: 45. He fought in the revolution. He is a product of Frunze Military Academy. He is one of few Red generals who have firsthand knowledge of Russia's allies.

Just after the war broke out, he was sent to Britain and the U.S. for staff talks on supply problems. In the U.S. Golikov was treated (and behaved) more like a mystery man than a visiting celebrity. He was observed to be a muscular man with a head which seemed to have been carved from pink glass, to be so short that the handkerchief in Sumner Welles's pocket showed above his clean-shaven crown. Beyond that nothing was known. He disappeared after a brief visit.

Back in Russia he was given command of one of the seven armies that saved Moscow. There he saw what the Germans were capable of doing--but also what his own men could do. Golikov's army defeated two divisions of much-touted Heinz Guderian's Second Tank Army and took the towns of Mikhailov and Yepifan. This year he was promoted from army commander to commander of the Voronezh front. What he has done there, culminating last week in the cracking of the Germans' rigid southern line, suggests that he personally burns for total destruction of the enemy.

Commander in Excelsis. But the key to Russia's military determination is the man who is key to everything in Russia. If Russia's allies knew as much about Joseph Stalin as he knows about them, they would have a much clearer idea of where he stands. The few U.S. and British diplomats and officers who have talked with Stalin say that he knows more than most Washington and London officials about Allied performance, personalities and weaknesses. He has on the end of his blunt tongue the exact dates of and reasons for the fall of Bataan, Corregidor, Singapore, Hong Kong, Rangoon. He says: "Timoshenko is my George Washington" (because Washington retired from Philadelphia to Valley Forge but still won the Revolutionary War); and: "Zhukov, he is my George B. McClellan--except that he has never lost a battle" (McClellan always hollered for more men, more weapons, more supply, more cavalry--but he lost the Seven Days' Battles, June 1862).

Responsible men who have talked with Stalin all come away with the conviction that he has the fixed determination to destroy Hitler's Army and to punish, man by man, Hitler's henchmen. He has, they say, a fanatical desire to keep hammering the Germans, to keep them rolling, never to let them get set for a counteroffensive. Some say he wants to raze Berlin, as so many Russian cities have been razed. They are unanimous in believing that there is no thought of a negotiated peace in his stubborn mind. They are satisfied that the reason he did not attend the Casablanca conference was that he was busy at his desk directing the crucial stages of his offensive--and last week's news seemed to bear this out.

The Record. Since Stalin has been Russia's dictator, Russia has made much of abiding by signed agreements and official promises. The occupation of the Baltic States was accomplished by diplomatic pressure. The military occupation of part of Poland, the Russian argument runs, took place after the Government of Poland with which Russia had a non-aggression pact had ceased to exist. Fin land was attacked on the somewhat flimsy grounds that the Finns allegedly fired first. Nevertheless, Russia's efforts to keep the peace of Europe were stronger than most. She tried to give the League vitality. She led the way in making bilateral pacts.

The Russians themselves point to these promises as the definition of their war aims. Last week Pravda quoted Joseph Stalin's speech of Nov. 6, 1941: "We have not, nor can we have, such war aims as the seizure of foreign territories or the conquest of other peoples. . . . Our first aim is to free our territories and our peoples from the German Nazi yoke. We have not, nor can we have, such war aims as the imposition of our will and our regime on the Slavic and other enslaved peoples of Europe who are waiting for our help. Our aim is to help these peoples in their struggle for liberation from Hit ler's tyranny."

Other Russian declarations:

> On Russian border demands, Stalin said in the May Day order of 1942: "We want to liberate our Soviet land--our brothers the Ukrainians [including Bessarabians], Moldavians, White Russians [perhaps including those in its Polish sections], Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Karelians."

> Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky said to the Inter-Allied Meeting, London, Sept. 24, 1941: "The Soviet Union defends the right of every nation to independence and territorial integrity . . . and its right to establish such a social order and to choose such a form of government as it deems opportune and necessary. . . ."

> The Anglo-Soviet Treaty of May 26, 1942, says: "Britain and Russia wish to unite with other like-minded States in adopting proposals for common action to preserve peace and resist aggression in the postwar period."

> On the punishment of Nazis, Foreign Commissar Molotov's Declaration for War Crime Trials, Oct. 14, 1942 (urging the immediate trial of Rudolf Hess) : "The Soviet Government . . . expects that all interested States will mutually assist each other in searching for extradition, prosecution and stern punishment of the Hitlerites and their accomplices guilty of the organization, encouragement, or perpetration of crimes on occupied territory." A decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet setting up a committee to list Axis crimes against Russia (Nov. 1942) specifically asks for trial of German Army commanders.

> On the clashing ideologies of the Soviet-Anglo-American coalition (from Stalin's address on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the October Revolution, Nov. 6, 1942): "It would be ridiculous to deny the differences in ideologies and social systems of these countries. [This does not] preclude the possibility of joint action on the part of the members of this coalition against the common enemy. . . ."

Bitter Taste. These declarations are specific--perhaps more specific than the published postwar aims of the U.S. and Britain. But they leave many a forward-looking question unanswered. They omit any reference to Japan, with which Russia has a non-aggression pact. Some of the phraseology of these declarations is ambiguous and, to the Allied way of thinking, at least open to debate: e.g., the inclusion of Bessarabia and the Baltic States ("our brothers") in "Soviet lands"; government, self-chosen or not, which is "opportune and necessary."

On their part, the Russians might well have some uncertainties about the intentions and desires of Britain and the U.S. toward Europe. Their main clue is the Atlantic Charter, which is not notable for its reinforced-concrete qualities. To this Russia has subscribed. If the record of Allied politics in North Africa has caused certain British and U.S. citizens qualms, it had certainly not been reassuring to the Reds. They cannot be any more certain of the Allied game in Yugoslavia than the Allies can of theirs. The Russians, who consider that they have a right to the Baltic States and Bessarabia, do not like to hear Americans question that right. When Columnist Constantine Brown did just that last week, Pravda answered angrily: "Why should he not make a generous present of California or Alaska to the United States? Do there not exist curious people who are ready to present to the Soviet Union parts of the latter's own territory?"

Mutual uncertainty might develop into one of the great tragedies of World War II: that, having won a victory over an enemy who was certainly common, the victors might not be able to negotiate a common future. The thing which made this tragedy a real danger was the tendency of people at large and even some statesmen to speak in vague, fearful cliches without attempt to find out even what the Russians want.

The Russians are conscious of this danger. It was a danger which U.S. citizens, as wartime partners in a United Nations not yet efficiently united, would have to face and think about, not in vague and fearful cliches nor in sentimental idealistics, but as citizens of the postwar world.

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