Meat of History

In the morning, Red tankmen chipped ice off the treads and gun barrels. Their breath was cotton-thick in the chill air; their polushubki (half-coats) were stiff with frost. The cold had come late. But now, in some sectors, this was the harshest winter in a century.

The tanks, mobile guns, trucks rolled forward again, across the flatlands and icebound marshes. With blank eyes the men watched the burning enemy tanks, the sidings lined with freight cars from France, Poland, Belgium, Holland, the black-and-yellow posts marked Deutschland, planted on Russian soil by the confident Wehrmacht. With blank eyes they saw Nazi posters on charred village walls: an SS soldier hugging a husky Ukrainian woman, with happy children and goats playing in the background. They had seen such women swing from German gallows, had seen the bullet-holed bodies of such children (see cut).

In recaptured Kirovograd, a woman reverently kissed a Red tank caterpillar. Far to the north, in a small village in White Russia, villagers caught a Nazi setting buildings afire, dragged him to a bleak cemetery, made him run the gantlet. Too late to strike her blow, an old, hobbling woman, dragging a heavy yoke, screamed: "Revive him, revive him! I must pay him back for my man he killed, for my house he burned." When a bucketful of ice water revived the Nazi, she brained him.

Target: Railroads. Despite bad weather, weariness and tough opposition, hate and victory spurred the soldiers on.

At Vinnitsa and Sarny, battles raged (see map, p. 23). More than ever, the Red Army fought for railroads. Near Vinnitsa a force under General Nikolai Vatutin kept its eye on the Odessa-Warsaw line; the Germans had to hold it to escape disaster in the Dnieper bend.

For another army commanded by General Vatutin, now 59 miles inside old Poland, the objective was the Lwow-Konigsberg supply artery (see map, p. 23). Since last fall this tough tankman had severed two major north-south railroads remaining to the Germans in that area. At Lwow, he would cut the third--and last.

Hit Where It's Soft. In three weeks, Vatutin's men had rolled 150 miles to the west, 80 miles southwestward to Rumania. Moscow claimed they had killed 100,000 Germans, taken 7,000 prisoners, captured or destroyed more than 2,000 cannon, 2,500 tanks.

But now Vatutin's Big Push was showing signs of exhaustion. His men were tired, his supply routes long. By & large, he had traversed the belt of German flight; now he was coming up against defenses his canny opponent, Field Marshal Fritz Erich von Manstein, had had ample time to build.

For the Red Army's Stavka (Supreme Command) this was a signal to turn to a well-tested stratagem: dispersed punching. German reserves had been shifted from above Vatutin's sectors north to south to succor Manstein. It was time to punch the weakened fronts.

In the Pripet Marshes, the puncher was Russia's famed General Konstantin Rokossovsky. For weeks, he had been massing white-painted tanks, artillery, ski troops, cavalry, aircraft. Great strength, he knew, was needed, for the terrain was cruel, the roads few, the enemy defenses thick.

How thick they were the Russians discovered early. On an eight-mile front they ran into four lines of trenches, 300 blockhouses, deep mine fields. In the opening hours of the advance, Red sappers removed 4,500 mines.

Tanks rushed by the German command from the rear were ambushed. Counterattacks were beaten back. Red cavalry knifed deep into the forests, to surprise garrisons far behind the front. Swarms of guerrillas fell upon enemy supply lines, convoys, posts.

The Germans did not hold. Rokos-sovsky's men marched into Mozyr, the Pripet Marshes' second strongest base. This week they headed toward the Wehrmacht's strongest base in the region, Pinsk, 97 miles away. Behind, in the snow-garlanded forests, countless German stragglers froze to death.

Farther north, Red armies hammered at Vitebsk. New thrusts sprang out of Nevel. Striking across dense forests south of Lake Ilmen, Russian troops had torn a ten-mile gap in German lines, cut an important railroad. A drive north of the lake threatened the great stronghold of Novgorod. Somewhere, the Stavka hoped, the German line would burst under the fierce pressure, let the Red flood through.

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