Mincemeat at Minsk

The crushing power of the Soviet offensive amazed and delighted the Allied world. It amazed and staggered the Germans.

In the first week of the great push, five major Nazi strongholds fell: after Vitebsk (which had withstood two fierce Red assaults in the past year), Orsha, Mogilev, Bobruisk, Zhlobin. Nothing like this, in so short a time, had ever happened to the Wehrmacht before.

In that week, the Russians said, they killed or captured at least 183,000 German troops, and the enemy was losing 30,000 more every day. Some Red thrusts had maintained a pace of 20 to 24 miles a day --faster than the Wehrmacht in its blitziest days, against pushover opposition, had moved in Poland, France, Greece, Yugoslavia.

Barrel's Bottom. The Red forces encountered surprisingly sparse deployments of German tanks and other armor. Probably half of the Reich's armor was pinned down in Italy and France; the remainder was not enough for Russia.

But the Germans could not transfer units from France without paving the way for Montgomery, making defeat in the west more certain. The 20-odd divisions committed to rear-guard action in Italy might have made the difference if they had been shifted to Russia, but it was too late for that now. And the Nazis could not borrow from other sectors of the Russian front itself without openly inviting the Reds to walk through.

Joseph Stalin's armies had no such troubles. They were strong in men and weapons and they held the offensive. Their own choice of a place for the first impact, and their management of it, raised no questions at all.

The View Is Long. Aside from their natural desire to "cleanse" the last Russian soil of the enemy, their White Russia drive seemed calculated to bring that front into line with the more advanced southern sector, which would then have its right flank secured for a sweep across south Poland to Germany. Last week's push might also be the start of a flank envelopment which might reach for Koenigsberg and cut off all the Nazi hordes to the north.

Under Rokossovsky, Bagramian, the young Chernyakhovsky (TIME, July 3) and Colonel General Georg Zakharov, a central-front newcomer who won his spurs in the Crimea, the Russians had 80 to 100 divisions, by German count, concentrated on a front of 200 miles.

As the Germans in 1940 did in France, the Russians hacked and slashed into the defense zones, cutting them to mincemeat, swallowing the pieces separately. Last week, after Polotsk, Borisov and Slutsk fell, giant jaws closed on Minsk, the last great Nazi stronghold in White Russia.

The upper jaw of the Soviet crunch reached far behind Minsk and cut the railroad to Vilna; the lower jaw snapped the trunk line to Warsaw near Baranowicze. Minsk fell, trapping an estimated 150,000 more Germans. Swarms of Red bombers blasted the roads to Vilna and Koenigsberg, to Bialystok and Brest-Litovsk.

The View Is Short. The lone little German success of the week was the political maneuvering by which they kept beleaguered Finland in the war against Russia (see FOREIGN NEWS). Finland was another front where time meant something to the Germans. They wanted to keep the Soviets' 20 divisions (plus reserves) in Finland tied up there as long as possible, to stave them off their own necks at Narva. They were desperately anxious to keep the Russians away from Petsamo and its nickel mines, away from the Petsamo air base from which German planes sniped at Allied shipping in the Arctic.

The Germans signalized their coup in Finland by parading third-rate troops around Helsinki, actually sent one armored division and a few planes to the wavering front between fallen Viipuri and Helsinki. The Russians, having retaken a 150-mile enemy-held stretch of the Murmansk-Leningrad railroad between Lakes Ladoga and Onega, were now shipping seaborne supplies direct from Murmansk to Leningrad on this line. On the Karelian front the Red armies were patently able to do their will.

In Finland, too, Germans' time was growing short.

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