"Rok" Fights Again

Late winter frosts swept over the Eastern Front, hardened sodden roads and swamps, dusted the battlefield with snow. Red Armies pushed forward hard. Time was precious. In another three or four weeks spring would lay its warm, sticky hand upon this land.

From the Baltic to the Black Sea, at least a dozen armies hammered relentlessly at the retreating foe. Ten-mile gains a day were not rare, nor the capture of 200 to 300 villages. Secondary German bastions fell one after another.

"Rok" Strikes. Ancient Pskov, with its dilapidated, mossy-walled kremlin, was still the Red Army's prime target. This week, Red units pressed toward the city's gates. At the Pskov railroad station, charred ruins and the stench of war marked the spot where Red bombers caught dozens of Nazi trains being loaded for evacuation.

The Wehrmacht fought for Pskov with skill and fury: beyond it lay Estonia and Latvia, and then the Baltic, washing Germany's own shores. But not even Pskov's fate worried the Germans as much as the Russian threat to the Vitebsk-Rogachev line, and to Minsk, the kingpin of the German defense system in the north.

The threat developed overnight, and grew hourly. Behind it loomed the skilled hand of dynamic, canny Konstantin Rokossovsky--the man who destroyed the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad.* Inactive for two months, "Rok" last week hurled into battle a force estimated by Berlin at 100,000, captured Rogachev.

"Rok's" victory outflanked Zhlobin, which he could not take by frontal assault. This week it also placed his army only 20 miles from a major enemy base at Bobruisk. Some 90 miles beyond Bobruisk, on the historic Smolensk road on which Napoleon lost his army, lay Minsk.

"Express-Train Tempo." Berlin's report to Sweden said: "The development of the Baltic and White Russian fronts is assuming express-train tempo. If the Russians cannot be halted along the Pskov-Polotsk line, sensational events can be expected in the Baltics in the nearest future."

* Recent Moscow gossip said Rokossovsky had been retired after the 1937 Army purge, returned to active service in 1941 after a plea to Stalin by Talent-scout Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov, Chief of Army Staff.

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