Two Cities

The city squatted on a towering bluff above the forests and marshes across the Desna. It looked shabby and scarred and a little indolent, for its steel mills and cement plants were silent and its people hid in dark corners. Atop the cliff German soldiers were building new defenses. Beyond the river two grimy, shattered railroad stations echoed the rumble of troop trains. And from the forests guerrillas watched the city, and emerged at night to derail German trains, ambush convoys, kill sentries.

The city's name was Bryansk.

Six hundred miles to the south, along the rim of a deep, blue-watered bay, spread another city. Once it was known for its neat streets, its champagne and cement, its busy harbor. But now it lay hushed below the hills from which rescue would some day come.

The hills were peopled by sailors who had fought at Odessa and Sevastopol, and were now determined to regain the city below them. Day after day, German shells and bombs ploughed the hills, killed men, maimed their guns. But the sailors did not retreat, and their guns let no German ship enter the bay, no train reach the station. For 13 months the sailors stayed in the hills, and each day the rows of German crosses in the city parks grew longer.

This city was Novorossiisk.

Last week, the Russians struck at Novorossiisk from land and sea, stormed through its concrete defenses and blazing ruins, captured it on the fifth day. On the following day thousands of other men crossed the Desna under a murderous German fire, took the burning shell of the city that once was Bryansk. In Moscow, gun salvos announced the double victory.

Victories. Bryansk and Novorossiisk were only two of a thousand victories, large and small, scored during the past week. From Velikie Luki southward, nine Red Army groups totaling perhaps 3,000,000 men were surging forward, crushing enemy "hedgehogs," sending the foe reeling back. Last week these armies:

-- Recaptured 3,800 towns and villages, including the vital railroad centers of Pavlograd, Krasnograd and Lozovaya;

-- According to Stockholm, broke through the German defenses on the Velikie Luki front and sent a "Latvian Army of Liberation" toward the Latvian border, some 70 mi. away:

-- Captured Yartsevo, the strongest barrier on the road to Smolensk, and Nezhin, the last strong barrier on the road to Kiev;

-- Fought their way to the gates of Chernigov, on a crucial all-weather highway.

Goals. With its armies, as the week turned, within eight mi. of Melitopol, within 20 mi. of the Dnieper, 25 mi. of Smolensk, 35 mi. of Kiev and 115 mi. of the old Polish border, Moscow remained closemouthed. Yet the war maps spelled clearly the Red Army's immediate objectives: Smolensk, Kiev, the Dnieper, the Crimea.

Smolensk was the goal of two big armies, headed by Colonel General Andrei Yeremenko, hero of Stalingrad, and Army General Vassily Sokolovsky. After their forces cracked six lines of steel and concrete, Moscow commented jubilantly: "[The line] which closed the so-called Smolensk Gate has been broken."

Kiev was the objective of Army General Konstantin Rokossovsky's powerful and mobile army, plentifully supplied with tanks and with U.S trucks.

Closer to the Dnieper than Rokossovsky were his teammates, Army Generals Nikolai Vatutin, whose sector hung over Poltava, and Rodion Malinovsky, now almost within gun range of Zaporozhe.

But there was many a sign that Malinovsky's fast-moving army might yet swerve south to help Colonel General Fedor Tolbukhin seal the narrow Crimean bottleneck. If these two able generals succeeded, the German forces in the Crimea and Kuban--perhaps as many as 300,000 men-- would find themselves trapped within a huge nutcracker, one jaw pressing from the Ukraine, the other from the Caucasus. Russia's Black Sea Fleet, based on recaptured Novorossiisk, would add to the Wehrmacht's woes.

Retreat. On all these fronts the German retreat has been both costly and hurried, but not disorganized. Everywhere the Nazis found time to destroy the towns they abandoned; nowhere did they lose many prisoners.

Yet so tremendous was the momentum of the Red drive that at any moment the retreat could become a rout. By all rules of war and logic the Red Army needed time to rest, replenish supplies, restore communications. But it might well have reserves of hidden strength enabling it to press its attack without a respite.

It was with thought of this hidden strength that Finland's Helsingin Sanomat cried anxiously: "The Eastern front is moving an enormous step closer toward Europe's frontiers." It was with the same thought that the Wehrmacht's mouthpiece, Captain Ludwig Sertorius, admitted somberly last week: "It is not yet clear where and when the retreat will halt."

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